Sir Hans Adolf Krebs: Architect of Metabolic Cycles

Sir Hans Adolf Krebs was born August 25, 1900, at the dawn of a new century in Hildesheim, Germany. He was the son of Dr. Georg Krebs, an ear, nose, and throat surgeon, and his wife Alma Davidson. As a young child, Krebs attended Lutheran schools, despite his Jewish heritage; his parents rarely even mentioned Judaism in the household. Hans Krebs went on to study medicine at the Universities of Göttingen, Freiburg-im-Breisgau, and Berlin. In 1925, he earned his MD degree at the University of Munich. Following his medical education, Dr. Krebs spent an additional year studying chemistry in Berlin. In 1926, he was appointed assistant to Professor Otto Warburg at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Biology. He studied under Dr. Otto Warburg for 4 years before returning to clinical work. Later in his career, Dr. Krebs shared his sincere gratitude for Dr. Warburg’s mentoring and training in research. In Dr. Warburg’s laboratory, he learned manometry to measure oxygen consumption of tissue slices, which allowed the precise investigation of biochemical (metabolic) pathways from animal tissues. These techniques were essential tools Dr. Krebs later used to discover the citric acid cycle and other novel metabolic pathways.