Otto Fritz Meyerhof worked in biochemistry at a period when the field was still deciding what counted as an answer.
Otto Fritz Meyerhof was born at Hanover in 1884. His recorded nationality is Germany. He was educated at Heidelberg University and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.
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.
The institutions that housed his research were Heidelberg University, Kiel University and University of Pennsylvania, where the work centred on biochemistry.
Biochemistry made it possible to explain disease and nutrition in the same vocabulary.
The Germany setting is not incidental. National academies, funding and language decided which findings travelled and which stayed local, in this period as in ours.
Formal recognition came in the shape of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (1922) and Foreign Member of the Royal Society (1937).
The measure that matters is durability. Results that survive re-examination become the floor of a discipline, and it is on that floor that everything afterwards is built.
Death came in 1951, at 67. By then the contribution had passed into the settled body of biochemistry, where it is used without being credited - the surest sign that it was right.
Achievements
- Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine — 1922
- Foreign Member of the Royal Society — 1937
- Held posts at Heidelberg University, Kiel University and University of Pennsylvania
- Educated at Heidelberg University, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and University of Strasbourg
- Fields of research: biochemistry
