About Clive E. West

Dr. Clive West was born in Griffith, New South Wales, Australia. He obtained his Bachelor of Science degree in Biochemistry from the University of Sydney in 1960 and his Doctor of Philosophy degree in animal nutritional biochemistry from the University of New England in New South Wales in 1966. He earned a Doctor of Science degree from the University of New England in 1991 and was elected Fellow of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute in 1974. In the Netherlands, where he and his family lived for the last 25 years, he was a registered nutritionist, epidemiologist, and animal experimentalist.

Dr. West believed that the biggest challenge of today's teacher is to instill an understanding of the difference between information and evidence-based knowledge. He taught biochemistry and also conducted experiments and research on cholesterol metabolism, diet and cancer, and vitamin A and mycotoxins during his assignments with Unilever Research Laboratory in the United Kingdom, the Australian National University, Ahmadu Bello University in Nigeria, Emory University in the United States, and Wageningen University and the University Medical Center Nijmegen in the Netherlands.

During his career, Dr. West carried out substantial work on the health importance and bioavailability of vitamin A and other micronutrients including iron, iodine, zinc and folic acid. His research established that the amount of vitamin A available from plant foods (provitamin A) during human digestion was consistently overestimated.

This led to the National Academy of Sciences of the United States Institute of Medicine considerably revising their conversion rates for the vitamin A value of β-carotene from a mixed diet. IVACG and the broader international nutrition community adopted these new conversion rates. Dr. West did not shrink from long-term endeavors like this that required patience and continued field investigations and dissemination.

Thousands of professionals benefited as Dr. West advanced continuing education related to bioavailability, micronutrients, and micronutrient malnutrition. Attentive to laboratory accuracy, he helped colleagues improve the quality of analysis of retinol in serum in developing nations, particularly in Africa. In addition to lecturing in the Netherlands, Switzerland, Zimbabwe, Vietnam, and Chile, he organized micronutrient short courses in South Africa and Indonesia and national and international conferences in several countries.

Under his supervision, 28 students obtained their doctoral degrees and many more would consider Dr. West as a mentor. Beyond Dr. West's teaching, mentoring, and leadership activities worldwide, he still managed to publish more than 270 papers in refereed scientific journals. The topics ranged from farm animal nutrition to human nutrition (lipoproteins, nutrition and cancer, food intake and composition, and micronutrients) using a variety of techniques: epidemiological studies, controlled intervention trials in humans, and experiments with laboratory animals. He conducted micronutrient research in the Netherlands, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Malawi, Kenya, Benin, Indonesia, Vietnam, China, Guatemala, and Ecuador.

Dr. West was instrumental in moves to increase the quality and compatibility of data on food composition in Europe and globally. He was the founder Chairman of Eurofoods; Chairman of the Management Committees of European Union-funded projects on food composition and food consumption; Joint Director of FoodComp courses held biennially in Wageningen and in South Africa; and advisor to FoodComp courses held in Chile, Jamaica, and Thailand.

The special contribution Dr. West made to research and teaching in tropical nutrition and to the study of deficiencies of micronutrients, in particular vitamin A, zinc, and iodine were recognized in 2003 with the Eijkman Medal from the Dutch Stichting Het Eijkman Medaillefonds. In honor of his work on nutrition related to developing nations, Dr. West received the Kellogg Prize of the Society for International Nutrition Research, American Society for Nutritional Sciences, during the April 2004 Experimental Biology meeting.

Dr. West was a member of the Dutch Nutrition Council Committee on Diet and Cancer and a member of Dutch Health Council Committee on Recommended Dietary Allowances. At the time of his death, he served as a member of the United Nations University Committee on the Harmonisation of Dietary Intakes. As Joint Director of the European Nutrition Leadership Programme since 1998, he guided establishment of nutrition leadership programs in Africa and Southeast Asia.

The field of nutrition is stronger and the details of our understanding of food and health greater thanks to the curiosity, perseverance, and leadership of Dr. Clive West. Throughout his career, he asked numerous important questions and many are not yet answered. The micronutrient community will sense his impact for years to come as others continue to explore and resolve the issues he brought to the fore.