Fritz Lipmann

Facts

Fritz Albert Lipmann

Photo from the Nobel Foundation archive.

Fritz Albert Lipmann
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1953

Born: 12 June 1899, Koenigsberg, Germany (now Kaliningrad, 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”

Prize share: 1/2

Work

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.

To cite this section
MLA style: Fritz Lipmann – Facts. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Prize Outreach AB 2023. Fri. 29 Sep 2023. <https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/1953/lipmann/facts/>

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