Volume 24 | Issue 3 | Page 88
Date: 2010-03-01
By Brendan Borrell
Nature rejects Krebs’s paper, 1937
What would be the perfect revenge for a scientist whose paper is turned away fromNature? A Nobel Prize, of course. Such was the case for Hans Krebs, the biochemist who nabbed the award in 1953 for discovering the citric acid cycle, or “Krebs cycle”—the cellular pathway that converts carbohydrates, fats, and proteins into energy.
Photo: © SPL / Photo Researchers, Inc.
In March 1937, Krebs and a colleague minced the breast of a freshly killed pigeon in their lab, suspended it in solution, and observed its metabolic rate decline over the next half hour. By adding a salt of citric acid, however, they were able to keep the tissue “alive” for three times as long. Additional experiments revealed the cyclical nature of the pathway, which regenerates citric acid with each cycle and releases ATP—the cell’s primary energy currency.