Kenneth J. Carpenter was born in England in 1923 and received a Ph.D. in Nutritional Science from Cambridge University in 1948. After a period as a scientific officer at the Rowett Research Institute in Scotland and as a Kellogg Foundation fellow at Harvard University, he returned to a teaching position at Cambridge in 1956 where he became
a fellow of Sidney Sussex College. In 1977 he was appointed
Professor of Experimental Nutrition at the University of California, Berkeley in the U.S.A.

His research was concerned mainly with the limited
bioavailability of the nutrients in foods, and particularly of lysine and niacin. His publications on the historical development of nutritional science include The History of Scurvy and Vitamin C (1986), Protein and Energy: a Study of Changing Ideas in Nutrition (1994) and Beriberi, White Rice and Vitamin B (2000).