Albrecht Kossel isolated several major structural parts of the nucleic acids and discovered histidine, an essential amino acid. He received the 1910 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine for his work with the nucleic acids and cellular proteins.

Kossel was born in Rostock, Germany, where his father was a merchant. Kossel's first scientific love was botany, but he was convinced by his father to study medicine and received his medical license in 1877. He next went to the University of Strasbourg (then part of Germany), where he became interested in physiological chemistry and worked with Ernst Hoppe-Seyler on the nucleic acids. After serving on university faculties in Berlin and Marburg, in 1901 he became head of the physiology department at the University of Heidelberg.

Between 1877 and 1881 he served as Ernst Hoppe-Selyer's assistant and began his studies of the nucleic acids, which had been discovered ten years earlier by one of Hoppe-Selyer's...