A merchant’s son from Hannover
Otto Fritz Meyerhof was born on April 12, 1884, in Hannover, Germany, to a wealthy Jewish family. His father, Felix Meyerhof, was a merchant; his mother was Bettina May. Soon after his birth the family moved to Berlin, where Otto grew up and attended the Wilhelms-Gymnasium, a classical secondary school.
At sixteen he fell ill with a kidney disease that kept him in bed for a long time. During those months, his Nobel biography records, he was much influenced by his mother’s constant companionship. He read widely, wrote poetry and went through a period of intense artistic and intellectual growth. A love of art, literature and philosophy stayed with him for the rest of his life.
From psychiatry to the chemistry of life
Meyerhof studied medicine at Freiburg, Berlin, Strasbourg and Heidelberg, graduating from Heidelberg in 1909 with a thesis on a psychiatric subject. For a while he devoted himself to psychology and philosophy, publishing a book on the psychological theory of mental illness and an essay on Goethe’s methods of scientific research.
In Heidelberg he met the young biochemist Otto Warburg, and under his influence turned to the physiology of living cells. He learned physical chemistry, worked at the marine biology station in Naples, and in 1912 moved to the University of Kiel, where he qualified as a lecturer in physiology in 1913 and became a professor in 1918. In 1914 he married Hedwig Schallenberg, a painter he had met in Heidelberg.
Before he turned to muscle, Meyerhof studied how cells use oxygen. He extended the methods of gas analysis by measuring the heat that living cells produce, and he used them to study the metabolism of sea-urchin eggs, blood cells and various bacteria, including the respiration of nitrifying bacteria that turn ammonia into nitrate in soil. He investigated how narcotics and dyes such as methylene blue affect oxidation in cells, and how killed cells could still respire.
Comparing oxygen respiration with alcoholic fermentation in yeast extract, he discovered a coenzyme of respiration found in all the cells and tissues then examined, and a coenzyme of fermentation. He also showed that sulphur-containing groups in cells help transfer oxygen to unsaturated fats. Lectures he gave in Kiel, England and the United States were published as The Chemical Dynamics of Living Matter. This background in measuring energy precisely is what allowed him to solve the problem of muscle.
How a muscle pays for its work
At Kiel Meyerhof set out to find where the energy for muscle contraction comes from. Working with frog muscles, he measured precisely how much heat they produced, how much oxygen they consumed, and how much lactic acid and carbohydrate they contained before and after work. He showed that when a muscle contracts, glycogen, the stored form of sugar, is broken down into lactic acid. During recovery, when oxygen is available, part of the lactic acid is burned for energy and most of it is rebuilt into carbohydrate.
This was the first clear chemical account of the energy cycle of working muscle, and it matched the heat measurements made in England by Archibald V. Hill. In 1922 the two men shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, Meyerhof “for his discovery of the fixed relationship between the consumption of oxygen and the metabolism of lactic acid in the muscle.” His explanation of the oxygen debt that follows hard exercise became a foundation of the science of sport and physical exertion.
Glycolysis in a test tube
In 1924 Meyerhof moved to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Biology in Berlin-Dahlem, and in 1929 he became head of physiology at the new Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg. In 1925 he achieved a decisive step: he extracted from muscle a soluble mixture of enzymes that could carry out the whole breakdown of sugar outside the living cell. With this extract he and his colleagues reconstructed, step by step, the chain of about ten chemical reactions that converts glucose or glycogen into lactic acid.
That pathway, glycolysis, was assembled in the late 1920s and 1930s by Meyerhof’s group together with Gustav Embden in Frankfurt and Jakub Parnas in Lwów, and it is still called the Embden–Meyerhof–Parnas pathway. In 1929 his assistant Karl Lohmann isolated adenosine triphosphate, ATP, and Meyerhof’s laboratory showed that certain phosphate compounds carry large amounts of energy. The Nobel Foundation’s biography calls this a revolution in the understanding not only of muscle but of all cellular metabolism.
Why it matters today
Glycolysis is the first stage by which almost every living cell, from bacteria to human brain cells, extracts energy from sugar. It is taught to every student of medicine and biology, and it is the starting point for understanding how the body uses food. Doctors rely on this knowledge when they measure lactate in the blood of patients with sepsis or shock, when they manage diabetes, a disease of glucose handling, and when they treat inherited enzyme deficiencies of the pathway.
Glycolysis is also central to cancer research. Many tumours burn glucose through glycolysis at very high rates, a phenomenon first described by Meyerhof’s mentor Warburg, and modern PET scans detect cancers by tracking where a radioactive form of glucose is taken up. Coaches and sports scientists use the ideas Meyerhof and Hill developed about lactic acid, oxygen debt and recovery to design training for athletes.
Even the modern view of lactic acid echoes his findings. For decades athletes were told that lactic acid was simply a waste product that caused fatigue. Today physiologists see lactate as a valuable fuel that the body recycles and burns, much as Meyerhof showed in 1920s Kiel when he found that most of the lactic acid formed in working muscle is either oxidised or rebuilt into carbohydrate during recovery.
A school of great scientists
Meyerhof’s laboratories in Kiel, Berlin and Heidelberg trained a remarkable generation of biochemists. Among those who worked with him were Fritz Lipmann, who later discovered coenzyme A and won a Nobel Prize; the Spanish-born Severo Ochoa, another future laureate; the French microbiologist André Lwoff; and the neurochemist David Nachmansohn. Meyerhof was a fine experimenter but, by temperament, most interested in theory and in integrating many phenomena into one picture. He spent long hours each day at his desk and in discussion with his students.
The lineage is striking. Lipmann built directly on the energy-rich phosphate compounds discovered in Meyerhof’s laboratory when he set out the idea of ATP as the cell’s energy currency and later found coenzyme A, for which he shared the Nobel Prize in 1953. Ochoa, who studied with Meyerhof in Germany, shared the 1959 Nobel Prize for work on the enzymes that make genetic material. Lwoff, who came to Heidelberg on a Rockefeller grant in 1932, shared the prize in 1965.
In 1923 he was offered a professorship in the United States, but Germany did not want to lose him, and he stayed. That decision would soon put him in danger.
Persecution and escape
After the Nazis came to power in 1933, Jewish scientists were driven out of German universities and institutes. Meyerhof held on in Heidelberg for several years under growing pressure, but in 1938 conditions became impossible and he left Germany with his family for Paris, where he became director of research at the Institut de Biologie Physico-Chimique with support from the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation.
In June 1940 the German army invaded France and the Meyerhofs had to flee again, first to Toulouse and then to Marseille. With the help of the Emergency Rescue Committee, the American organisation run in Marseille by Varian Fry, and of the Unitarian Service Committee, they escaped through Spain and reached the United States in October 1940. The University of Pennsylvania and the Rockefeller Foundation created a post for him as research professor of physiological chemistry in Philadelphia, where he worked for the rest of his life.
American years and family
In 1923 he had turned down a professorship in the United States; seventeen years later he arrived there as a refugee. In Philadelphia Meyerhof continued his research on the enzymes of glycolysis and the energy of phosphate compounds, and he kept up his interest in philosophy, giving a critical lecture on Goethe’s scientific ideas to the Rudolf Virchow Society in New York. He was a foreign member of the Royal Society of London and a member of the US National Academy of Sciences.
He and Hedwig had three children: a daughter, Bettina, and two sons, Gottfried, who took the name Geoffrey in exile, and Walter, who became a physicist at Stanford University. Hedwig’s painting sharpened his own lifelong interest in art.
Death and legacy
Otto Meyerhof died in Philadelphia on October 6, 1951, at the age of 67. A Stolperstein, a memorial paving stone of the kind laid for victims of Nazi persecution, commemorates him in Hildesheim, and plaques in Kiel and Hannover recall his work.
His legacy is the map of how life turns sugar into usable energy. Every biochemistry textbook that draws the pathway from glucose to pyruvate and lactate carries his name, and every scientist who studies metabolism in health, sport, diabetes or cancer builds on the experiments he began on frog muscles in Kiel. Germany expelled him for being Jewish; the knowledge he created belongs to everyone.
Sources & further reading
Otto Meyerhof, Biographical, NobelPrize.org · Otto Meyerhof, Facts, NobelPrize.org · Otto Meyerhof, Jewish Virtual Library · Otto Fritz Meyerhof, Wikipedia · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life 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.