Edwin Gerhard Krebs was born to William Carl Krebs and Louisa Helena Stegeman Krebs in Lansing, Iowa, on June 6, 1918. He was the third of four children. His father, a Presbyterian minister, died while Krebs was in his first year of high school. In order to keep Krebs's two older brothers enrolled at the University of Illinois in Urbana, Louisa Krebs moved the family from Greenville, where Edwin Krebs grew up, to the university town.

In 1940, after completing his high-school and undergraduate work in Urbana, Krebs entered medical school at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri. He had the opportunity to work under Arda A. Green, who was associated with Carl Ferdinand Cori and Gerty T. Cori. The Coris were a husband-and-wife team who had won the Nobel Prize in 1947 for research on carbohydrate metabolism and the enzyme phosphorylase. Krebs's later collaboration with Fischer at the...