The German biochemist Otto Fritz Meyerhof (1884-1951) shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discovery of the fixed relationship between oxygen consumption and the metabolism of lactic acid in muscle and for establishing the cyclic character of energy transformations in the living cell.

Otto Meyerhof son of Felix Meyerhof, a merchant, was born in Hanover on April 12, 1884. His school education in Berlin was long interrupted by kidney disease, but during his period of absence his intellectual and literary interests, owing to the personal influence of his mother, developed greatly. He became a medical student in the University of Freiburg im Breisgau and also studied at the Universities of Berlin, Strasbourg, and Heidelberg. In 1909 he graduated as a doctor of medicine at Heidelberg. Thereafter he worked in the laboratory of the medical clinic at Heidelberg, where he met the young biochemist Otto Warburg, who encouraged him...