Otto Meyerhof

Origins and early life

Otto Fritz Meyerhof was born in Hannover on 12 April 1884, the son of wealthy Jewish parents, and grew up in Berlin, where the family moved when he was four. He read medicine in Berlin, Strasbourg and Heidelberg and graduated in 1909 with a thesis on the psychological theory of mental illness; in Heidelberg he met Hedwig Schallenberg, whom he married in 1914 and with whom he had three children.

Work and career

He moved to Kiel in 1912 and held a professorship there from 1918. The question he answered was what a muscle runs on. A muscle at work consumes oxygen and produces lactic acid, and Meyerhof measured the two against each other, showing that a fixed proportion of the lactic acid is oxidised and that the energy released is used to rebuild the rest — a closed cycle of chemical work with a ledger that balances, and the first quantitative account of how a living cell turns fuel into motion.

He shared the 1922 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Archibald Hill. In 1929 he became one of the directors of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg, and held the post until 1938, when Jews were expelled from university positions. He left for Paris that year, fled to Marseille after the fall of France, and reached the United States by ship in 1940 with the help of the Emergency Rescue Committee.

Later years

He taught at the University of Pennsylvania and died in Philadelphia on 6 October 1951; the central chain of reactions he mapped is still called the Embden–Meyerhof–Parnas pathway.