Hans Adolf Krebs, 25 August 1900 - 22 November 1981
Hans Adolf Krebs died in Oxford on 22 November 1981, at the age of 81 and only two weeks after leaving his beloved laboratory for treatment, in hospital, of what he believed was a trivial gastric upset. With his death ended an era of research into intermediary metabolism and its regulation, of which Krebs had been a pioneer, that he had brought to fruition, and to the central feature of which—‘the Krebs Cycle’—his name will surely always be attached. In his Biographical Memoir [111] of his own teacher, Otto Warburg, Hans quoted from the preface of G. N. Lewis & M. Randall’s (1923) Thermodynamics and the free energy of chemical substances . There, the edifice of science was likened to a cathedral built by the efforts of many workers but of only a few architects: Hans believed that Warburg was one of those few. Indubitably, Hans Krebs was another.