Hans A.Krebs
Hans A.Krebs
Born: 25 Aug 1900 in Hildesheim, Germany
Died: 1981
Sir Hans Adolf Krebs is the son of Georg Krebs, M.D., an ear, nose,
and throat surgeon of that city, and his wife Alma, née Davidson.
Krebs was educated at the Gymnasium Andreanum at Hildesheim and between
the years 1918 and 1923 he studied medicine at the Universities of Göttingen,
Freiburg-im-Breisgau, and Berlin. After one year at the Third Medical Clinic of
the University of Berlin he took, in 1925, his M.D. degree at the University of
Hamburg and then spent one year studying chemistry at Berlin. In 1926 he was
appointed Assistant to Professor Otto Warburg at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute
for Biology at Berlin-Dahlem, where he remained until 1930.
In I930, he returned to hospital work, first at the Municipal Hospital at Altona
under Professor L. Lichtwitz and later at the Medical Clinic of the University
of Freiburg-im-Breisgau under Professor S. J. Thannhauser.
In June 1933, the National Socialist Government terminated his appointment and
he went, at the invitation of Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins, to the School of
Biochemistry, Cambridge, where he held a Rockefeller Studentship until 1934,
when he was appointed Demonstrator of Biochemistry in the University of
Cambridge.
In 1935, he was appointed Lecturer in Pharmacology at the University of
Sheffield, and in 1938 Lecturer-in-Charge of the Department of Biochemistry then
newly founded there.
In 1945 this appointment was raised to that of Professor, and of Director of a
Medical Research Council's research unit established in his Department. In 1954
he was appointed Whitley Professor of Biochemistry in the University of Oxford
and the Medical Research Council's Unit for Research in Cell Metabolism was
transferred to Oxford.
Professor Krebs' researches have been mainly concerned with various aspects of
intermediary metabolism. Among the subjects he has studied are the synthesis of
urea in the mammalian liver, the synthesis of uric acid and purine bases in
birds, the intermediary stages of the oxidation of foodstuffs, the mechanism of
the active transport of electrolytes and the relations between cell respiration
and the generation of adenosine polyphosphates.
Among his many publications is the remarkable survey of energy transformations
in living matter, published in 1957, in collaboration with H. L. Kornberg, which
discusses the complex chemical processes which provide living organisms with
high-energy phosphate by way of what is known as the Krebs or citric acid cycle.
Krebs was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1947. In 1954 the
Royal Medal of the Royal Society, and in 1958 the Gold Medal of the Netherlands
Society for Physics, Medical Science and Surgery were conferred upon him. He was
knighted in 1958. He holds honorary degrees of the Universities of Chicago,
Freiburg-im-Breisgau, Paris, Glasgow, London, Sheffield, Leicester, Berlin
(Humboldt University), and Jerusalem.
He married Margaret Cicely Fieldhouse, of Wickersley, Yorkshire, in 1938. They
have two sons, Paul and John, and one daughter, Helen.