Michael Denborough

Michael Antony Denborough AM (11 July 1929 – 8 February 2014) was an Australian academic and medical researcher who founded the Nuclear Disarmament Party.

Denborough was born in Salisbury, Rhodesia to Paul Peter Denborough and Alma Mary Hepburn. He was educated at Prince Edward School in Salisbury and the University of Cape Town before being awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to Exeter College, Oxford, where he was an assistant at the Nuffield Department of Clinical Medicine, Radcliffe Infirmary. He married Erica Elizabeth Griffith Brown on 12 December 1959. He was Resident Medical Officer at National Heart Hospital in London in 1958 before travelling to Australia, where he was First Assistant at the University of Melbourne and Royal Melbourne Hospital from 1960 to 1968, Reader in Medicine at the University of Melbourne from 1972 to 1974 and was a Professorial Fellow at the John Curtin School of Medical Research in Canberra from 1974 to 1991, working as Acting Head of the Department of Clinical Science from 1975 to 1981 and Acting Director of the Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies in 1982. From 1992 to 1994 he was Professor of the John Curtin School of Medical Research at the Australian National University, retiring in 1995. He has since been an Emeritus Professor.

Denborough founded the Nuclear Disarmament Party in 1984 and contested elections on its behalf numerous times. He published Australia and Nuclear War in 1984 and later edited The Role of Calcium in Drug Action. He was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia in 1999. Denborough's research has centred on malignant hyperthermia which he described in 1962 and has tentatively linked with Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.

He died on 8 February 2014.

See also

• List of peace activists
• Jean Melzer
• Peter Garrett
• Jo Valentine
• Anti-nuclear movement in Australia