Sir Hans Adolf Krebs, FRS (, German: [hans ˈʔaːdɔlf ˈkʁeːps] ; 25 August 1900 – 22 November 1981) was a German-British biologist, physician and biochemist. He was a pioneer scientist in the study of cellular respiration, a biochemical process in living cells that extracts energy from food and oxygen and makes it available to drive the processes of life. He is best known for his discoveries of two important sequences of chemical reactions that take place in the cells of nearly all organisms, including humans, other than anaerobic microorganisms, namely the citric acid cycle and the urea cycle. The former, often eponymously known as the "Krebs cycle", is the sequence of metabolic reactions that allows cells of oxygen-respiring organisms to obtain far more ATP from the food they consume than anaerobic processes such as glycolysis can supply; and its discovery earned Krebs a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1953. With Hans Kornberg, he also discovered the glyoxylate cycle, a slight variation of the citric acid cycle found in plants, bacteria, protists, and fungi. Krebs died in 1981 in Oxford, where he had spent 13 years of his career from 1954 until his retirement in 1967 at the University of Oxford.
Biography
Early life and education Krebs was born in Hildesheim, Germany, to Georg Krebs, an ear, nose, and throat surgeon, and Alma Krebs (née Davidson). He was of Jewish ancestry and was the middle of three children. He had an elder sister, Elisabeth, and a younger brother, Wolfgang. Krebs attended school at the Gymnasium Andreanum in his home town. Near the end of World War I, in September 1918, six months short of completing his secondary school education, he was conscripted into the Imperial German Army. He was allowed to take an emergency examination for his high school diploma, which he passed with such a high score that he suspected the examiners of being "unduly lenient and sympathetic". With the end of the war two months later, his conscription ended. Krebs decided to follow his father's profession and entered the University of Göttingen in December 1918 to study medicine. In 1919, he transferred to the University of Freiburg. In 1923, he published his first scientific paper on a tissue staining technique. He did this work under the guidance of Wilhelm von Mollendorf starting it in 1920. He completed his medical course in December 1923. To obtain a Doctor of Medicine degree, and a medical license, he spent one year at the Third Medical Clinic in the University of Berlin. By then he had turned his professional goal from becoming a practising physician to becoming a medical researcher, particularly in biochemistry. In 1924, he studied at the Department of Chemistry at the Pathological Institute of the Charité Hospital, in Berlin, for training in chemistry and biochemistry. He earned his MD degree in 1925 from the University of Hamburg.
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