Born in
Worcester, England, Hamblin's early years were spent in
Aldershot in
Hampshire where he and his family lived on Cambridge Road; he was educated at
Farnborough Grammar School (1954–1961) and the
University of Bristol. Hamblin presented the
BBC 2 episode 'Of Mice and Men' (1998) in its
Counterblast series, in which he argued for the use of animals in medical research. He publicised the fact that, contrary to popular belief,
spinach contains no more
iron than
lettuce, while pink succulent
lobster contains none at all; like all
invertebrates its
respiratory pigment is based on
copper rather than iron. He claimed in a 1981
BMJ paper that the belief in spinach having a high iron content was due to a decimal point error that was discovered in the 1930s;
Mike Sutton published an article in 2010 questioning Hamblin's story. In a later article, Sutton discovered that, contrary to popular belief, Hamblin was not the original source of the spinach decimal error myth. Hamblin died on 8 January 2012 of cancer. ==References==