Fritz Lipmann

Origins and early life

Fritz Albert Lipmann was born in Königsberg, then the capital of East Prussia, on 12 June 1899, the son of Leopold Lipmann, a lawyer, and of Gertrud Lachmanski.

Work and career

He came, in the words of the Dictionary of Scientific Biography, from a typical liberal German-Jewish middle-class family, in which education, the arts and social engagement mattered and religion less so. He studied medicine at Königsberg, Berlin and Munich, served in the army medical service in 1918, took his medical degree in Berlin in 1924, then turned to chemistry and took a doctorate in 1927. He trained in Otto Meyerhof's laboratory in Berlin and Heidelberg, and in 1932 followed Albert Fischer to the Biological Institute of the Carlsberg Foundation in Copenhagen, where he stayed when Hitler came to power the following year.

In 1939, warned by Danish friends of the danger of remaining, he left for the United States, worked at Cornell Medical School in New York and from 1941 at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. His paper of 1941 on the generation and use of phosphate bond energy introduced the squiggle sign for energy-rich phosphate, the driving force behind many of the reactions of the living cell. In Boston, in 1946, he discovered a cofactor needed to activate acetate and named it coenzyme A, the letter standing for that activation, and it proved to be the missing link in the citric acid cycle described by Hans Krebs.

Recognition

He became professor of biological chemistry at Harvard Medical School in 1949, and he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for 1953 with Krebs, his half for his discovery of co-enzyme A and its importance for intermediary metabolism.

Later years

From 1957 he was a professor at the Rockefeller Institute in New York, received the National Medal of Science in 1966, and died in Poughkeepsie, near his country home in Rhinebeck, on 24 July 1986, aged eighty-seven.