Sir hans krebs biography of michael

Hans Krebs

Sir Hans Krebs (1900 – 1981)

DID YOU KNOW THAT … it was in Sheffield that Hans Krebs did much of the work on the tricarboxylic acid cycle for which he received the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1953?

The tricarboxylic acid (Krebs or citric acid) cycle is a fundamental metabolic process, common to animals, plants and bacteria, in which a two-carbon (C2) fragment, derived from a food source, is oxidised to two molecules of carbon dioxide with the release of energy.

Krebs showed that this C2 fragment is attached to a C4 receptor, which is then regenerated during the cycle. His integration of his own observations with those of others into a cyclic process was a major intellectual achievement and laid the foundation for the almost explosive development of biochemistry in the middle of the twentieth century.

Until that time biochemists thought of metabolic processes as linear, each process in isolation. The concept of a cyclic process led to our u