Hans Adolf Krebs
British biochemist
Died when: 81 years 89 days (974 months)Star Sign: Virgo
Sir Hans Adolf Krebs, FRS (/krɛbz, krɛps/, German: [hans ˈʔaːdɔlf ˈkʁeːps]; 25 August 1900 – 22 November 1981) was a German-born 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 humans and many other organisms, namely the citric acid cycle and the urea cycle.
The former, often eponymously known as the "Krebs cycle", is the key sequence of metabolic reactions that provides energy in the cells of humans and other oxygen-respiring organisms; and its discovery earned Krebs a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1953.
With Hans Kornberg, he also discovered the glyoxylate cycle, which is 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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