Born in Königsberg, Germany, Fritz Lipmann earned his medical degree at the University of Berlin in 1922 and, five years later, received his Ph.D. there as well. For the next several years, Lipmann conducted research at Otto Meyerhof's laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany, and taught at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin. In 1932, when the Nazi movement in Germany made life increasingly uncomfortable, he accepted a position with the Carlsberg Foundation in Copenhagen, Denmark. In 1939, Lipmann immigrated to the United States, settling first at the Cornell Medical School and then, two years later, moving on to Harvard (1941-49) and then the staff of Massachusetts General Hospital (1949-57). In 1957, he became Professor of Biochemistry at the Rockefeller Institute in New York.

For a long time, most of Lipmann's research at these institutions centered around carbohydrate metabolism, especially the role played by phosphates. In 1937, Lipmann had discovered, almost by...