Adolph
Krebs

(1900 - 1981)

 

Sir Hans Adolf Krebs (August 25, 1900 – November 22, 1981) was a German, later on British medical doctor and biochemist.

Biography

He was born in Hildesheim, Germany, to Alma and Georg Krebs. His father, Georg, was an ear, nose, and throat surgeon. Hans went to school in Hildesheim and studied medicine at the University of Göttingen from 1918-1923. He gained his Ph.D. at the University of Hamburg in 1925, then studied chemistry in Berlin for one year, where he later became an assistant of Otto Warburg at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Biology until 1930.

Because of his partially Jewish heritage (his mother was jewish) he was barred from practicing medicine in Germany and he immigrated to England in 1933. He was invited to Cambridge, where he worked in the biochemistry department under Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins (1861-1947). Krebs became professor of biochemistry at the University of Sheffield in 1945.

Krebs' area of interest was intermediary metabolism. He discovered the urea cycle in 1932 and the citric acid cycle in 1937, which is still often called Krebs cycle. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1953.

Sir Krebs was elected Honorary Fellow of Girton College, Cambridge University in 1979. Krebs died in Oxford, England in 1981.

Courtesy of:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Adolf_Krebs