Hans Krebs

Hans Krebs (1900-81), German-born British biochemist and Nobel laureate, who made fundamental contributions to the chemistry of body processes. Born in Hildesheim, and educated at the universities of Göttingen, Freiburg, Munich, Berlin, and Hamburg, Hans Adolf Krebs served (1926-30) as a research assistant at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Biology. After working briefly at the University of Freiburg, he left Germany in 1933 and settled in England. There he became a Rockefeller research student at the University of Cambridge. Associated with the University of Sheffield after 1935, he was professor of biochemistry and director of research in cell metabolism from 1945 to 1954; in 1954 he was appointed to similar posts at the University of Oxford. Krebs developed the so-called Krebs cycle, or citric acid cycle, which explains how the various chemical factors in food are turned into physical energy in the human body. He shared the 1953 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine with the American biochemist Fritz Albert Lipmann.