Hans Krebs (biochemist)
Sir Hans Adolf Krebs,
FRS (, ; 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.
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