- Person
- Fritz Lipmann
- Lived
- 1899–1986
- Field
- Biochemistry
- From
- German-American
The story
Fritz Lipmann was born in 1899 in Königsberg, Germany, into a liberal German-Jewish family. He trained in medicine, learned biochemistry in Otto Meyerhof’s laboratory in Berlin and Heidelberg, and moved to Copenhagen in 1932. Barred by the Nazi race laws from an academic career in Germany, he stayed in Denmark and in 1939 emigrated to the United States, working in New York, at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard in Boston, and from 1957 at Rockefeller University.
In 1941 Lipmann published an essay, “Metabolic Generation and Utilization of Phosphate Bond Energy,” that gave biochemistry one of its central ideas. Cells, he argued, capture the energy released from food in special energy-rich phosphate bonds, above all in adenosine triphosphate, ATP, and spend it wherever work must be done: contracting muscle, building proteins, transmitting nerve impulses. He marked these bonds with a squiggle, ~. The picture of ATP as the universal energy currency of life became standard in every biology and medical textbook.
In Boston he then hunted for the active form of acetate, the small two-carbon molecule into which sugars, fats and proteins are broken down. He found that the reaction required an unknown factor, isolated it, showed that it contains the B vitamin pantothenic acid, and named it coenzyme A. Joined to acetate as acetyl-CoA, it is the fuel that enters the citric acid cycle discovered by Hans Krebs, and the Nobel presentation compared its discovery to the last notch of a combination lock falling into place. Lipmann and Krebs shared the 1953 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
Acetyl-CoA turned out to be a crossroads of metabolism: the body uses it to burn fuel and to build fatty acids, cholesterol, steroid hormones and the nerve transmitter acetylcholine. This knowledge underpins the modern understanding of nutrition, obesity, diabetes and inherited metabolic diseases, and explains why pantothenic acid is an essential vitamin. Statins, among the most prescribed drugs in the world, lower cholesterol by blocking HMG-CoA reductase, an enzyme that acts on a coenzyme A compound in the cholesterol pathway. Lipmann died in 1986.
Why it matters
Lipmann’s ideas about ATP and his discovery of coenzyme A are the basis of how medicine understands energy, nutrition and cholesterol metabolism, including the target of statin drugs.
About Fritz Lipmann
Königsberg-born biochemist who discovered coenzyme A and explained ATP as the cell’s energy currency, central to understanding metabolism, nutrition and disease. Nobel Prize 1953.
Sources
- Fritz Lipmann, Biographical NobelPrize.org
- Award ceremony speech, 1953 NobelPrize.org
- Lipmann, Fritz Albert Encyclopedia.com
- Fritz Albert Lipmann Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.