Metabolism
Year of Discovery: 1938
What Is It? Krebs discovered the circular chain of chemical reactions that
turns sugars into energy inside a cell and drives metabolism.
Who Discovered It? Hans Adolf Krebs
Why Is This One of the 100 Greatest?
Muscles do the work for your body. You eat food and—somehow—it turns into energy that your muscles burn to move. But how? How does this thing called metabolism
work?
The process of metabolism in human bodies is so important to our understanding of
human anatomy that three Nobel prizes have been given to people who contributed to our
understanding of it. The third was given to Hans Adolf Krebs, who finally solved the mystery and discovered how our bodies metabolize food into energy. It was one of the great
medical discoveries of the twentieth century.
How Was It Discovered?
British physiologist Archibald Hill believed that muscles should produce heat when
they contracted. By 1913, he had developed ways to measure changes as small as 3/1000 of
a degree. To his surprise he discovered that, during muscle contraction, no heat was produced nor was any oxygen consumed.
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