Fritz Lipmann
Facts
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.
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