Nathan Radin

Nathan Radin, 91, a retired clinical chemist, died of prostate cancer on Dec. 15, 2010.


A native of New York City, Radin earned a B.A. in biochemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1941. During World War II, he served in the Army from 1942 to 1945. He then earned an M.A. in organic chemistry at Columbia University in 1947 and a Ph.D. in analytical chemistry from Purdue University in 1951.

At the start of his career, Radin worked at the Army Engineer Research & Development Laboratories at Fort Belvoir, Va., and then at Lederle Laboratories in its Aureomycin production section. Two years later, Radin became a research chemist at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City, before teaching in the chemistry department of Rochester Institute of Technology for three years. He then spent seven years as chief biochemist at Rochester General Hospital.

In 1967, Radin moved to Atlanta to join the staff of the Communicable Disease Center (CDC), which became the Center for Disease Control in 1970. Serving as a CDC unit chief, he organized a clinical chemistry laboratory proficiency testing program. Through his work on the purification and characterization of cholesterol, he helped lay the foundation for the establishment of primary reference standards for the clinical chemistry laboratory at the National Bureau of Standards (now the National Institute of Standards & Technology). He retired from CDC in 1986.

He was an emeritus member of ACS, which he joined in 1946. He was also a member of the American Association for Clinical Chemistry (AACC), Sigma Xi, and Phi Lambda Upsilon. He was the 2008 recipient of the AACC History Division’s Sam Meites Award.

Radin is survived by his wife, two children, and two grandsons.