Whitley Professor of Biochemistry at Oxford University from 1954 until his death. He was born in Hildesheim, Germany, and was educated in that country. He had to give up his post as lecturer in medicine at the University of Freiburg, Bavaria, and emigrate to England with the advent of the Nazis. He shared the 1953 Nobel Prize for Medicine for his discovery of the citric acid cycle which describes the chemical stages of oxidation of foodstuffs in living organisms.