LIPMANN, FRITZ ALBERT

LIPMANN, FRITZ ALBERT (1899–1986), U.S. biochemist and Nobel Prize winner. Lipmann was born in Koenigsberg, Germany. From 1927 to 1931 he pursued research at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin and at Heidelberg. With the rise of the Nazi regime he left Germany and went to Denmark, working at the Biological Institute of the Carlsberg Foundation in Copenhagen from 1932 to 1939. He then immigrated to the United States and worked at Cornell University from 1939 to 1941, at the Massachusetts General Hospital from 1941 to 1947, and at the Harvard University Medical School, where he was professor of biological chemistry from 1949 to 1957. In 1957 he was appointed professor at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York. In 1953 Lipmann was awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine and physiology, which he shared with hans krebs , for his discovery of coenzyme A and its importance for intermediary metabolism. This substance plays an important role in the "Krebs cycle" through which food is converted into carbon dioxide, water, and energy. Lipmann found that coenzyme A contains pantothenic acid, one of the vitamin B group. His hundreds of contributions to scientific journals include papers on metabolism, vitamin function, and cell structure. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: T.N. Levitan, Laureates: Jewish Winners of the Nobel Prize (1960), 173–5; Chemical and Engineering News, 26 (March 1948), 860. (Samuel Aaron Miller)