LONDON.- A Nobel Prize Medal awarded to Hans Krebs (1900-1981) - the scientist who explained one of the most fundamental processes of life: the conversion of food into energy within the cell – will be offered for auction at Sotheby’s in London on 14 July 2015. A Jewish refugee who fled Nazi Germany for the UK in the early 1930s, Hans Krebs became of one of most pre-eminent scientists of the 20th century. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine for the discovery of the Citric Acid Cycle, commonly known as the Krebs Cycle, in 1953.

Estimated at £250,000-350,000, the medal will be sold to benefit The Sir Hans Krebs Trust, established to provide grants for the support of refugee scientists and the training of young scientists in the biomedical sciences.

Lord Krebs said “I am donating my father's Nobel Prize Medal in order to establish a Charitable Trust in his name. My father was helped by the Academic Assistance Council when he came to Britain as a refugee scientist, so the Sir Hans Krebs Trust will provide support for today’s refugee biomedical scientists. The Trust will also support the training of doctoral students in the biomedical sciences: my father was a passionate believer in the importance of training the next generation. I believe that he would have thoroughly approved of the creation of the Trust by the sale of his Medal”

Sir Hans Krebs
Born in Hildesheim in, northern Germany, Krebs trained under the eminent biochemist Professor Otto Warburg, before establishing for himself an international scientific reputation with the publication in 1932 of a paper that explained how the liver produced urea, a highly important discovery that that confirmed his outlook as a biologist trying to elucidate chemical events in living cells.

The following year, however, Hitler came to power in Germany and Krebs, who was Jewish, was dismissed from his position at the University of Freiberg. Krebs’s scientific reputation made it much easier for him to leave Germany than it was for many others; he was almost immediately offered a position in Cambridge and in 1935 Krebs was offered a lectureship at the University of Sheffield, where he was to work for the next 19 years and conduct his most important research.

In 1937 Krebs published the sequence of reactions he called the citric acid cycle – a landmark discovery, that not only explained one of the most fundamental processes of life: the conversion of food into energy within the cell, but also shaped our understanding of the origins of life itself.

The full significance of his breakthrough was not immediately apparent. Indeed, his initial report on his discovery was rejected by Nature in 1937. However after peace was restored after WWII, research began to proliferate that consolidated Krebs’ pre-war breakthrough. The Nobel prize followed in 1953.

Later he was also awarded a knighthood, a Royal Society Copley Medal and the German order of merit, but he remained a straightforward and unaffected man who was active in the laboratory almost until his death in 1981.