Early life and education
Konrad Emil Bloch worked in biochemistry at a period when the field was still deciding what counted as an answer.
Konrad Emil Bloch was born at Nysa in 1912. His recorded nationality is Germany. He was educated at Columbia University and Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München.
Around the turn of the twentieth century the sciences fractured into specialisms and simultaneously became national assets, funded and directed on a scale no earlier generation had seen.
Twenty questions, eight minutes on the clock, and a percentile measured against everyone who has taken it. No sign-up.
Take the IQ test →Professional appointments
He held appointments at Florida State University, Harvard University and University of Chicago, where the work centred on biochemistry.
Scientific influence and achievements
Biochemistry supplied the mechanism that biology had been describing from the outside.
He did not stay inside one field: the work runs across biochemistry and chemistry, which tells you as much about the era's training as about the person.
Working from Germany shaped what was possible. Access to instruments, collections, journals and colleagues has always been geographic, and the history of science is partly a history of that inequality.
Awards and recognition
The honours are a fair index of how the work was received - National Medal of Science (1988), Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (1964) and Foreign Member of the Royal Society (1985).
Legacy and death
Read now, the significance is less in any single result than in the fact that the results held. Biochemistry is cumulative, and a contribution counts if the next generation could stand on it.
Konrad Emil Bloch died in 2000 at the age of 88. The work outlived the debates that surrounded it, which is the only durable form of scientific success.
Achievements
- National Medal of Science — 1988
- Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine — 1964
- Foreign Member of the Royal Society — 1985
- Held posts at Florida State University, Harvard University and University of Chicago
- Educated at Columbia University, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München and Technical University of Munich
- Fields of research: biochemistry
