David Robert Hadden

His training through the early 1960s, in his chosen specialty of endocrinology and diabetes, began in the Royal Victoria Hospital, Belfast. After a Clinical Research Fellowship using the new technique of radioimmunoassay to measure growth hormone, he travelled as Fulbright Fellow to the Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore, USA . His identification and report in the journal Nature of a growth hormone binding protein, although dismissed by conventional thinking at the time, is now recognised as one of the first descriptions of that important regulatory protein. He brought this interest back to Belfast, as the first children with short stature and growth hormone deficiency were treated using growth hormone extracted from human pituitary glands. His own children also remember being lined up in his study each year to have height and weight measured and plotted on a centile growth chart, a tradition later extended to his seven grandchildren.