Hugo Theorell
Theorell, Hugo (1903-1982), was a Swedish biochemist who made valuable contributions to the knowledge of enzymes and how nutrients are oxidized to produce usable energy. He received the 1955 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for this work.
Axel Hugo Teodor Theorell was born in Linkoping, Sweden, in 1903. He attended the Karolinska Institute at Stockholm, and graduated in 1924 with a bachelor of medicine degree. He prepared his doctoral thesis on the lipids of blood plasma, and in 1930 he received an M.D. degree. At that time he was appointed lecturer in physiological chemistry at the Karolinska Institute. He also was on the staff of the Medico-Chemical Institution from 1924 to 1929. In 1932, he was appointed associate professor in medical and physiological chemistry at Uppsala University, and while there he became the first to isolate crystalline myoglobin, an oxygen-carrying protein found in red muscle. He also demonstrated how myoglobin differed from hemoglobin.
From 1933 to 1935, he worked on a Rockefeller fellowship with Otto Heinrich Warburg at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute (now the Max Planck Institute) in Berlin. He became the first to isolate a coenzyme when he successfully crystallized it and separated it from its carrier. He also proved that it was a protein related to riboflavin, and called it flavinmononucleotide.
In 1937, Theorell became director of the biochemical department of the Nobel Medical Institute. There he researched the nature and effects of various oxidation enzymes, particularly how enzymes called alcohol dehydrogenases catalyze the oxidation, or breaking down, of alcohol in an organism. His research provided a new method for testing blood alcohol content, which is used to test sobriety. Several strains of bacteria were also revealed in the alcohol enzyme research, which was useful in treating tuberculosis.
He retired from the Nobel Medical Institute in 1970.