Hans Adolf Krebs - Career

Career

Krebs joined the German army in 1932, and was appointed to the 13th Mechanized Infantry Division; until the Nazi party came to power in Germany Jews were welcome in the German army. Krebs returned to clinical medicine at the municipal hospital of Altona and then at the medical clinic of the University of Freiburg, where he conducted research and discovered the urea cycle.

Because he was Jewish, he was barred from practicing medicine in Germany and he emigrated to England in 1933. He was invited to Cambridge, where he worked in the biochemistry department under Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins (1861–1947). Krebs moved to the University of Sheffield in 1935 and became professor of biochemistry there in 1945. Krebs's area of interest was intermediary metabolism. He identified the urea cycle in 1932, and the citric acid cycle in 1937 at the University of Sheffield. He moved to Oxford as Professor of Biochemistry in 1954 and after his retirement continued work at the Radcliffe Infirmary, Oxford until his death. He was a fellow of Trinity College. His son John Krebs, now Baron Krebs, has become an renowned zoologist in his own right and is now principal of Jesus College, Oxford.

In 1953 he received the Nobel Prize in Physiology for his "discovery of the citric acid cycle." He was knighted in 1958.

He was elected Honorary Fellow of Girton College, Cambridge University in 1979.