Important personalitiesBack

Sir Hans Adolf Krebs (25 August 1900 – 22 November 1981) was a German-born British physician and biochemist. Krebs is best known for his identification of two important metabolic cycles: the urea cycle and the citric acid cycle. The latter, the key sequence of metabolic chemical reactions that produces energy in cells, is also known as the Krebs cycle and earned him a Nobel Prize in 1953, which he shared with Fritz Lipmann.


Early years

Krebs was born in Hildesheim, Germany, to Georg Krebs, an ear, nose, and throat surgeon, and Alma Krebs (née Davidson). He attended the famous old Gymnasium Andreanum in his home town and studied medicine at the University of Göttingen and at the University of Freiburg from 1918–1923. He earned 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.


Career

Krebs joined the German army in 1932, and was appointed to the 13th Mechanized Infantry Division; until the Nazi party came to power in Germany, Jews were welcome in the German army. Krebs returned to clinical medicine at the municipal hospital of Altona and then at the medical clinic of the University of Freiburg, where he conducted research and discovered the urea cycle. Because he was Jewish, he was barred from practicing medicine in Germany and he emigrated to England in 1933. He was invited to Cambridge, where he worked in the biochemistry department under Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins (1861–1947). Krebs moved to the University of Sheffield in 1935 and became professor of biochemistry there in 1945. Krebs's area of interest was intermediary metabolism. He identified the urea cycle in 1932, and the citric acid cycle in 1937 at the University of Sheffield. He moved to Oxford as Professor of Biochemistry in 1954 and after his retirement continued work at the Radcliffe Infirmary, Oxford until his death. He was a fellow of Trinity College. His son John Krebs, now Baron Krebs, has become a renowned zoologist in his own right and is now principal of Jesus College, Oxford. In 1953 he received the Nobel Prize in Physiology for his "discovery of the citric acid cycle." He was knighted in 1958. He was elected Honorary Fellow of Girton College, Cambridge University in 1979.