Fritz Albert Lipmann
Born: 12 June 1899, Koenigsberg (now Kaliningrad), Germany (now Russia)
Died: 24 July 1986, Poughkeepsie, NY, USA
Affiliation at the time of the award: Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA, USA
Prize motivation: "for his discovery of co-enzyme A and its importance for intermediary metabolism"
Field: biochemistry, cell physiology, metabolism
Prize share: 1/2
In 1937 Hans Krebs presented a complete picture of an important part of metabolism - the citric acid cycle. In this process, which has several steps, nutrients are converted to other molecules with a large amount of chemical energy. An important piece of the process was still missing - a substance that along with a protein forms an enzyme that facilitates an important step. In 1946 the substance was discovered by Fritz Lipmann, who described its role plays and gave it the name coenzyme A.