3 Squiggles and Gold
H
ans Krebs and Fritz Lipmann shared the 1953 Nobel Prize in Medicine for their separate but related discoveries about basic metabolism. Hans Adolf Krebs was born in 1900 in Germany. He made his first important discovery by sorting out exactly how the body neutralizes the toxic ammonia that is left over from the metabolism of protein.1 In 1932 the dean of the medical faculty at the University of Freiburg, surgeon E. Rehn, praised Krebs as an outstanding scientist whom the university should regard with pride. Krebs’s work was abruptly interrupted in 1933 when Germany’s National Socialist government passed the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, which scrubbed all public institutions of Jews and anti-Nazis.2 On April 12, 1933, the same Dean Rehn called for Krebs’s immediate suspension. A letter from the minister of education explained the termination: “The
1
H. Krebs and K. “Henseleit, Untersuchungen über die Harnstoffbildung im Tierkörper” [Studies on urea formation in the animal body], Hoppe-Seyler’s Zeitschift für physiologische 210 (1932): 33–66.
2
The legal document describing Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service can be seen on the website of the United States Memorial Holocaust Museum, section “Timeline of Events 1933–1938,” at ushmm.org/ learn/timeline-of-events/1933-1938/law-for-the-restoration-of-the-professional -civil-service.
