Metabolism and Nutrition
The People (13)
Christiaan Eijkman
Dutch military physician (1858–1930) whose chicken experiments in Java traced beriberi to polished white rice, leading to vitamin B1 and a 1929 Nobel.
Read the deep dive →Frederick Gowland Hopkins
English biochemist (1861–1947) who proved in 1912 that food holds trace accessory food factors, the vitamins, and discovered tryptophan and glutathione (Nobel 1929).
Read the deep dive →Otto Warburg
German biochemist (1883–1970) who measured cellular respiration, winning the 1931 Nobel, and found cancer cells ferment sugar even with oxygen present: the Warburg effect.
Read the deep dive →Albert Szent Gyorgyi
Hungarian physiologist (1893–1986) who identified vitamin C and won the 1937 Nobel, then showed that muscle contraction runs on actin, myosin and ATP.
Read the deep dive →Whipple Minot Murphy
George Whipple, George Minot and William Murphy showed that liver rebuilds blood, turning fatal pernicious anemia into a treatable disease (Nobel 1934).
Read the deep dive →Frederick Banting
Canadian surgeon (1891–1941) who led the 1921–22 Toronto work that isolated insulin, turning type 1 diabetes into a manageable condition (Nobel 1923).
Read the deep dive →Carl Gerty Cori
Prague-born physicians Carl and Gerty Cori worked out how the body stores and releases sugar as glycogen; in 1947 Gerty became the first woman Medicine laureate.
Read the deep dive →Hans Krebs
German-born biochemist (1900–1981), later at Sheffield and Oxford, who mapped the citric acid cycle where the carbon in food is burned for energy (Nobel 1953).
Read the deep dive →Hench Kendall Reichstein
Mayo Clinic's Philip Hench and Edward Kendall, with Swiss chemist Tadeus Reichstein, isolated adrenal cortex hormones and first gave cortisone for rheumatoid arthritis (Nobel 1950).
Read the deep dive →Henrik Dam Edward Doisy
Copenhagen biochemist Henrik Dam discovered vitamin K through bleeding chicks, and American Edward Doisy determined its chemical nature, sharing the 1943 Nobel Prize.
Read the deep dive →Bloch Lynen
Konrad Bloch at Harvard and Feodor Lynen in Munich traced, carbon by carbon, how cells build cholesterol and fatty acids from acetate (Nobel 1964).
Read the deep dive →Guillemin Schally
French-born Roger Guillemin and Polish-born Andrew Schally isolated the hypothalamic hormones by which the brain commands the pituitary, sharing half the 1977 Nobel.
Read the deep dive →Goldstein Brown
American physicians Michael Brown and Joseph Goldstein discovered the LDL receptor and how cells control their cholesterol supply, sharing the 1985 Nobel Prize.
Read the deep dive →Everyone in this group is a Nobel laureate in Physiology or Medicine, grouped by what the prize was awarded for. Insulin, the vitamins, the citric acid cycle, cholesterol. Almost all of it was awarded before 1990, which is why the nutrition pages on this site keep citing work a century old.
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