Edwin g krebs biography of barack

The scientific community mourned the passing of a number of brilliant minds in 2009. One of them, Edwin Gerhard Krebs, played particularly important roles at the Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC), serving as a member of the editorial board and for two decades as an associate editor. Dr. Krebs was also president of the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology in 1985.

Although Dr. Krebs left a lasting impression upon countless JBC editors, authors, and readers over the years, we asked his longtime collaborator and dear friend, Edmond H. Fischer, to share with us his thoughts about Ed Krebs' character and accomplishments. Together, Drs. Fischer and Krebs made the key discovery of reversible protein phosphorylation, and they shared the 1992 Nobel Prize in Medicine for their contributions to “the opening up of novel insight into basic protein regulations at all levels and in all cells.”

Edwin Krebs was a man who was known for both his professional achievements and his unique personal qualities; he will be greatly missed.

The JBC Editor and Associate Editors

Memories of Ed Krebs

Ed Krebs died December 21, 2009, after a long illness and an increasingly debilitating disease. For me, it marked the end of an extraordinary era and the end of a lifelong and marvelous friendship.

Born in Lansing, Iowa, on June 6, 1918, Ed undertook his undergraduate studies at the University of Illinois in Urbana and then attended medical school at Washington University in St. Louis. It was during a residency there in 1944 at Barnes Hospital that he met his wife, Deedy, who was then a student nurse. After a stint in the U.S. Navy, where he served as a medical officer, Ed returned to Washington University to join the laboratories of Carl and Gerty Cori as a postdoctoral fellow in 1946. It was there that he started his studies on muscle glycogen phosphorylase, an enzyme that had been shown by Arda Green to exist

Dr. Edwin G. Krebs, the University of Washington Nobel laureate who co-discovered the mechanism by which a wide variety of processes are turned on and off within cells and thereby led to an explosion of knowledge about how cells grow, change, divide and die, died Dec. 21 in Seattle from progressive heart failure. He was 91.

Krebs and his co-laureate Edmond H. Fischer discovered that most processes within cells -- ranging from fundamental metabolic reactions to the initiation of cancer -- are triggered when key proteins are activated by a process called phosphorylation, in which a phosphate molecule is added to the protein.

By adding or removing the phosphate, the enzyme’s activity can be switched on or off. Krebs and Fischer were the first to identify and characterize an enzyme that carries out this reaction, which is the basis of all biological function.

The process is so important that 1% of the human genome is devoted to blueprints for the production of the enzymes that carry out phosphorylation, according to the Nobel Prize citation.

Their work has helped researchers understand such disparate biological problems as how the drug cyclosporine prevents rejection of transplanted organs, why certain cancers develop, how hormones affect the body, how genetic information is transcribed into proteins and how the body metabolizes sugar to produce energy.

Defects in regulation of phosphorylation are at the heart of many disorders such as cancer, diabetes, nerve diseases and heart conditions, and a wide variety of modern drug research is targeted at the manipulation of this process.

The pair’s collaboration began in 1955 shortly after Fischer arrived at the University of Washington from his native Switzerland and learned that he and Krebs were investigating the same problem -- how muscles obtain the energy to contract.

“Krebs slapped me on the back and said, ‘Let’s take a crac

Edwin G. Krebs, a giant of biomedical science in the 20th century, died December 21, 2009 from congestive heart failure in Seattle, WA at the age of 91. His discovery (with Edmond H. Fischer) of protein phosphorylation as a regulatory mechanism touched all aspects of biomedical science and profoundly influenced therapeutic approaches now used in clinical care. Ed’s life epitomizes commitment to family, excellence in research, and academic service.
Edwin G. Krebs was born in Lansing in 1918, the son of a Presbyterian minister and a schoolteacher. His father died suddenly when Ed was 15 and, at the height of the Depression, the family moved to Urbana, IL, where Ed earned a degree in chemistry from the University of Illinois in 1940. As an undergraduate, he became enamored with organic chemistry but eventually chose to study medicine at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, MO.
Although the principal responsibility of a medical school during World War II was to train physicians for the armed forces, Ed also participated in medical research. After medical school and residency training at Barnes Hospital in St. Louis, he went on active duty as a medical officer in the Navy. Following his discharge in 1946, he returned to St. Louis and was accepted as a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Nobel Laureates Carl and Gerty Cori in the Department of Biochemistry. After two years of postdoctoral research on the interaction of protamine (a small sperm protein) with rabbit muscle phosphorylase, Ed became so captivated with biochemistry that he never returned to clinical medicine.
During his naval service, Ed enjoyed a brief visit to Puget Sound, so he happily accepted a position as assistant professor of biochemistry in the fledgling University of Washington School of Medicine in 1948. Under the visionary leadership of Hans Neurath, the Department of Biochemistry expanded in protein chemistry and enzymology, including recruitment in 1953 of Edmond