Background
He was born in Hildesheim, Germany, where his father was an ear, nose, and throat surgeon.
He was born in Hildesheim, Germany, where his father was an ear, nose, and throat surgeon.
He studied at several universities in Germany before graduating with the degree of M.D. from the University of Hamburg in 1925.
From 1926 to 1930 he was assistant to Otto Warburg at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, where Warburg was engaged in biochemical and metabolic research.
In 1932 he published his discovery of the ornithine cycle for urea synthesis in the mammalian liver, just a short while before Hitler came to power. Krebs fled to England from the Nazis in 1933 and worked for a short time in Cambridge as a Rockefeller research student. From 1934 to 1935 lie was a demonstrator in biochemistry at Cambridge before taking up a post as lecturer in pharmacology at Sheffield University in 1935.
In 1939 he became a naturalized British citizen just a few days after the outbreak of World War II, thus being spared the indignity of internment as a German alien.
A Sheffield University he continued the research into metabolic pathways that he had begun with Warburg, eventually completing the description of the tricarboxylic cycle (later known as the Krebs cycle) as an important step in the oxidation of foodstuffs. In 1945 he was appointed professor and became director of research into cell metabolism.
In 1954 Krebs was offered the Whitley Chair of biochemistry at Oxford University, where he remained until his official retirement in 1967.
Among Krebs’s other achievements were discoveries in glutamine synthesis, purine synthesis in birds, mechanisms involved in metabolic regulation, and the discovery of damino oxidase.
FROM KREBS’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY
On the Nobel Prize: “It is like having been stamped with a hallmark, a label of quality. Complete strangers ask for your comments and advice on all sorts of odd problems, assuming that Nobel laureates can answer any question.”
On his escape from Germany; “By good fortune I published my work on the ornithine cycle just a few months before Hitler came into power. Had I worked too leisurely or too often postponed work till the next day, life might have run a different course.... I set out expecting nothing special from life — as I had been brought up to do — except to survive by my own efforts, but because I have had more than my share of luck and a lucky constellation of genes, life has felt special indeed.”