- Person
- Otto Meyerhof
- Lived
- 1884–1951
- Field
- Biochemistry
- From
- German-American
The story
Otto Meyerhof was born in Hannover in 1884 to a wealthy Jewish merchant family and grew up in Berlin. He trained as a doctor and wrote first about psychiatry and philosophy, but the biochemist Otto Warburg drew him to the chemistry of living cells. From 1912 he worked at the University of Kiel.
Meyerhof wanted to know where the energy for muscle contraction comes from. Measuring the heat, oxygen use, lactic acid and carbohydrate of frog muscles with great precision, he showed that contraction breaks down glycogen, the body’s stored sugar, into lactic acid, and that during recovery with oxygen part of the lactic acid is burned and the rest is rebuilt into carbohydrate. This explained the oxygen debt that follows hard exercise and matched heat measurements by the English physiologist A. V. Hill. The two shared the 1922 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
In 1925, now in Berlin, Meyerhof extracted from muscle a soluble mixture of enzymes that could break down sugar outside the cell. Using it, his group in Berlin and Heidelberg, together with Gustav Embden and Jakub Parnas, worked out the sequence of about ten reactions that converts glucose into pyruvate and lactate. This pathway, glycolysis, is still called the Embden–Meyerhof–Parnas pathway. His assistant Karl Lohmann isolated ATP in 1929, and Meyerhof’s laboratory showed that certain phosphate compounds store large amounts of energy, ideas that transformed the understanding of how cells power themselves.
Glycolysis turned out to be nearly universal, the first step in the energy metabolism of bacteria, plants and every human cell. Knowledge of it underlies the study and treatment of diabetes, the measurement of blood lactate in critically ill patients, the diagnosis of inherited enzyme disorders, the science of athletic training, and cancer research, since many tumours consume glucose at high rates, a property used by PET scans to find them. As a Jew, Meyerhof was forced out of Germany in 1938 and escaped occupied France in 1940; he spent his last years at the University of Pennsylvania and died in 1951.
Why it matters
Meyerhof’s map of glycolysis is the foundation for understanding how the body uses sugar, knowledge used every day in medicine, sport science, diabetes care and cancer research.
About Otto Meyerhof
German Jewish biochemist who mapped how muscles turn sugar into energy (glycolysis), core knowledge for sport science, diabetes and cancer research. Fled the Nazis in 1940. Nobel Prize 1922.
Sources
- Otto Meyerhof, Biographical NobelPrize.org
- Otto Meyerhof, Facts NobelPrize.org
- Otto Fritz Meyerhof Wikipedia
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