medical doctor Hans Krebs could have crossed long before their joint honour
in1953 in Stockholm – perhaps they even did. The young biomedical genius,
Hans Krebs, worked from 1931 on as ward physician in the University Clinic
Freiburg. That did not last long. Then came the “turning point”, which Lothar
Jaenicke described so bitterly yet truthfully [17]:
In 1932 H. A. Krebs – Freiburg – received the Venia docendi and a considerable number of
estimable offers for his advancement. Eight weeks later he was ordered to stay away: The
Nazis had come to power and with them Germanity had broken out virulently. The highly
praised lecturer became a Jew and persona non grata overnight. His old, mildly resistant
teacher von Mo ¨llendorf was replaced as Rector Magnificus by the mystical opportunist
Heidegger as Fu ¨hrerrektor, who existentially provided the philosophical arguments for
what came to pass: The students drifted brainlessly but dangerously.
Hans Krebs left Germany in June 1933, went to Cambridge (Great Britain) and
continued to work on his “Krebs cycle”, the citric acid cycle. In 1937 he became
Professor for Physiology at the University of Sheffield and later in Oxford.
As far as the 1953 selection of the Nobel Prize winners for science is concerned,
one could look at this event as a perfect stage management of the Nobel Committee.
The Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology went to Hans Krebs for the “Citric
acid cycle and enzymatic reactions”, to Fritz Lipmann for “Coenzyme A”, and the
Nobel Prize for Chemistry to Hermann Staudinger [7, p. 1064]. In addition, Watson
and Crick had just rang in molecular biology definitely with their Nature article on
their DNA model [18].
Polymer science and biomedicine had developed in parallel! What a span of genius
and development from the achievements of Hermann Staudinger and his dreams on
the biology of life up to this great moment of science in 1953. I do not believe that
Hermann Staudinger was aware of Watson and Crick’s initial work on the doublehelix structure of DNA published in the 1953 April issue of Nature [18]. In any case,
he ended his Nobel Lecture with precisely what he could have read in that
Nature publication and what he had dreamed of all his life with farsightedness and
hope: “In the light of this new knowledge of macromolecular chemistry the wonder of
life reveals itself from its chemical side in the unending diversity and masterful
molecular architectonics of living materials” [19 and 7, p. 1067].
It is thus a delight to be able to see such an event in the history of science portrayed
in figures paralleled in two journals: Angewandte Chemie [7, therein Fig. 3, p. 1067;
https://www.gdch.de/gdch/historische-staetten-der-chemie.html] and Chemie in
Unserer Zeit, 2008 [20, therein Fig. 5, p. 350]. The photos show the Nobel Prize
winners in one case comparing their watches before the ceremony [7] and then
afterwards with the documents in their hands [20].
It is a pity that the brilliant essay of Klaus Roth about Hans Krebs [20] is only
available in German: “Dann machte ich mich alleine auf den Weg, um den Elf-UhrZug zu erreichen” (“Then I started off alone, to reach the 11 o’clock train”). This
review describes in many details the situation of Krebs, Staudinger and especially
Heidegger at the University of Freiburg in 1933, right from the beginning on.
A Moment of Reflection: Sixty Years After the Nobel Prize for Hermann Staudinger
13
in1953 in Stockholm – perhaps they even did. The young biomedical genius,
Hans Krebs, worked from 1931 on as ward physician in the University Clinic
Freiburg. That did not last long. Then came the “turning point”, which Lothar
Jaenicke described so bitterly yet truthfully [17]:
In 1932 H. A. Krebs – Freiburg – received the Venia docendi and a considerable number of
estimable offers for his advancement. Eight weeks later he was ordered to stay away: The
Nazis had come to power and with them Germanity had broken out virulently. The highly
praised lecturer became a Jew and persona non grata overnight. His old, mildly resistant
teacher von Mo ¨llendorf was replaced as Rector Magnificus by the mystical opportunist
Heidegger as Fu ¨hrerrektor, who existentially provided the philosophical arguments for
what came to pass: The students drifted brainlessly but dangerously.
Hans Krebs left Germany in June 1933, went to Cambridge (Great Britain) and
continued to work on his “Krebs cycle”, the citric acid cycle. In 1937 he became
Professor for Physiology at the University of Sheffield and later in Oxford.
As far as the 1953 selection of the Nobel Prize winners for science is concerned,
one could look at this event as a perfect stage management of the Nobel Committee.
The Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology went to Hans Krebs for the “Citric
acid cycle and enzymatic reactions”, to Fritz Lipmann for “Coenzyme A”, and the
Nobel Prize for Chemistry to Hermann Staudinger [7, p. 1064]. In addition, Watson
and Crick had just rang in molecular biology definitely with their Nature article on
their DNA model [18].
Polymer science and biomedicine had developed in parallel! What a span of genius
and development from the achievements of Hermann Staudinger and his dreams on
the biology of life up to this great moment of science in 1953. I do not believe that
Hermann Staudinger was aware of Watson and Crick’s initial work on the doublehelix structure of DNA published in the 1953 April issue of Nature [18]. In any case,
he ended his Nobel Lecture with precisely what he could have read in that
Nature publication and what he had dreamed of all his life with farsightedness and
hope: “In the light of this new knowledge of macromolecular chemistry the wonder of
life reveals itself from its chemical side in the unending diversity and masterful
molecular architectonics of living materials” [19 and 7, p. 1067].
It is thus a delight to be able to see such an event in the history of science portrayed
in figures paralleled in two journals: Angewandte Chemie [7, therein Fig. 3, p. 1067;
https://www.gdch.de/gdch/historische-staetten-der-chemie.html] and Chemie in
Unserer Zeit, 2008 [20, therein Fig. 5, p. 350]. The photos show the Nobel Prize
winners in one case comparing their watches before the ceremony [7] and then
afterwards with the documents in their hands [20].
It is a pity that the brilliant essay of Klaus Roth about Hans Krebs [20] is only
available in German: “Dann machte ich mich alleine auf den Weg, um den Elf-UhrZug zu erreichen” (“Then I started off alone, to reach the 11 o’clock train”). This
review describes in many details the situation of Krebs, Staudinger and especially
Heidegger at the University of Freiburg in 1933, right from the beginning on.
A Moment of Reflection: Sixty Years After the Nobel Prize for Hermann Staudinger
13