Co-Workers & Coenzymes

Two of the brightest young graduate researchers at Berlin's Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in the mid-20s were Fritz Albert Lipmann and Hans Adolf Krebs. Both took their work in biochemistry with utmost seriousness, but they never discussed the possibility of future fame. They would have been even less likely to do so if they had been able to foresee the course of German politics. Both were Jews.

Soon after the Nazis came to power, Lipmann decided that Germany was no place for him; a year's research assignment in Copenhagen stretched to seven years before he sought safer asylum in the U.S. In Boston, he became Harvard's professor of biological chemistry and head of a research laboratory at Massachusetts General Hospital. Krebs was summarily fired from his university post by the Nazis; fortunately he was invited to Cambridge University, where he arrived "with virtually nothing but a sigh of relief and a few books." Later he moved to Sheffield as professor of biochemistry.

Working in their separate ways, 3,000 miles apart, the two researchers tackled some of the most complex and fundamental problems in the biological processes by which food is converted into energy. Krebs had already shown that urea, the end product of nitrogen metabolism, is formed through a cycle of chemical reactions in the liver. Soon he was delving into a still more important cycle, by which products of sugar and fatty acids are broken down into a group of chemicals including pyruvic acid. This acid is oxidized or "burned" to form a go-between chemical now known as acetyl coenzyme A. Other acids, notably citric, are formed in a series of changes until the cycle begins to repeat itself with the introduction of another molecule of acetyl coenzyme A. In Krebs's citric-acid cycle or "wheel of fortune" reactions, energy is released to body cells. Now, Dr. Krebs believes, the same basic principles can be used to show how other body fuels are converted into energy.

At Massachusetts General, Dr. Lipmann did most of his work with an unlikely material: pigeon livers. "You have to follow your nose," he says. "You don't map it out. You try one experiment, then another, and bring some sense into it." This method led him, by 1945, to the isolation of coenzyme A, one of the most important trigger chemicals in the body. Dr. Lipmann has shown that his coenzyme is a factor in the body's production of vital substances such as fatty acids and steroid hormones. Some researchers hope that it may help to track down the cause of cancer, but Dr. Lipmann says modestly: "Our type of people really don't think much about practical things."

Last week, for their obscure work in cryptic processes of vast practical importance to medicine, Biochemists Lipmann (54) and Krebs (53) won fame and rich reward. They were picked to receive the 1953 Nobel Prize for medicine and physiology and share its $33,900.

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