Edmond Fischer

Origins and early life

Edmond Fischer was born on 6 April 1920 in the Shanghai International Settlement, to a French mother, Renée Tapernoux, and an Austrian father, Oscar Fischer, a Jewish lawyer who practised before the consular courts of the city.

Work and career

His maternal grandfather had founded the Courrier de Chine, the first French-language newspaper in China, and helped establish the French municipal school where Fischer began his education. At seven he and his two brothers were sent to boarding school in Switzerland, where he stayed to take his doctorate. In 1950 he crossed to the United States, meaning to go to Caltech and going instead to Seattle, which reminded him and his wife of Switzerland.

There he found Edwin Krebs asking the same question he was — where a muscle gets the energy to contract — and the two of them answered it: a cell switches a protein on and off by attaching and removing a phosphate group. Reversible phosphorylation turned out to be the general switch of cellular life. They shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1992. He played Beethoven and Mozart for his friends and held a pilot's licence. He died in Seattle on 27 August 2021, aged 101, the oldest living Nobel laureate.