Konrad Bloch · Science & Medicine
Biochemist awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize for elucidating the metabolism of cholesterol and fatty acids.
1912, Neisse, Germany (now Nysa, Poland) — 2000, Burlington, Massachusetts, United States
Germany · United States
Konrad Bloch is recognized among Jewish contributors to Science & Medicine — Biochemist awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize for elucidating the metabolism of cholesterol and fatty acids.
Origins and early life
Konrad Bloch was born on 21 January 1912 in Neisse, in the Prussian province of Silesia — now Nysa in Poland — the second child of middle-class parents, Hedwig Striemer and Frederich Bloch. He was born into a Jewish family and left Germany because of Nazi persecution of Jews: after studying chemistry at the Technical University of Munich from 1930, he fled in 1934 to a research institute at Davos in Switzerland, and reached the United States in 1936.
Columbia gave him a doctorate in biochemistry in 1938, and after years of teaching there and a period in Chicago he became Higgins Professor of Biochemistry at Harvard in 1954, a chair he held until 1982.
Work and career
His question was how the body builds cholesterol. Feeding acetate labelled with radioactive carbon, he traced every carbon atom of the cholesterol molecule back to it, and mapped the long chain of some thirty steps by which acetate becomes squalene and squalene becomes cholesterol. He then showed that bile acids and a female sex hormone are made from cholesterol in turn, which opened the way to understanding that the whole family of steroids descends from it.
He shared the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Feodor Lynen, and received the National Medal of Science in 1988. He died in Burlington, Massachusetts, on 15 October 2000, at the age of eighty-eight.
Verify and go deeper with these external references.
Source: Jinfo.org — Jews in Biology
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Biochemist awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize for elucidating the metabolism of cholesterol and fatty acids.
Source: Jinfo.org — Jews in Biology
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