The
Later Years
Hans
arrived in England with "virtually nothing but a sigh of
relief". But Hans was happy in England. There was much less
prejudice against Jews than in Germany and also fewer social barriers,
such as those in Germany due to politics, religion, exclusive
student fraternities, and class consciousness. The people in Great
Britain were generous and friendly. Hans had found a new home
and would never turn back to the old.
 In
Britain, Hans completed his work on the now famous Krebs cycle,
for which he later won the Nobel Prize in 1953. He hypothesized
the existence of certain chemical compounds and reactions
that might explain the observed waste products of carbon dioxide
and water. He and his first graduate student, William
Johnson, tested the hypotheses in a series of biochemical studies
in the very active breast muscle of pigeons. Hans sent the manuscript
to the prestigious journal, Nature, only to learn that
they did not want to publish it. William Johnson had to leave
science, because he could not secure a suitable position. The
last Hans heard of Johnson, he was managing a turtle farm on
Cayman Island. (The turtle farm is still there, and it is quite
a tourist attraction.) Hans eventually published this classic
paper, the one that won him the Nobel prize, in a Dutch journal
(Enzymologia, vol. 4, pp. 148-156, 1937). His place in the history
of great science had been secured.
Source: Krebs, Hans. Reminiscences and Reflections. Clarendon
Press Oxford. 1981.
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