Konrad Emil Bloch

German biochemist

Born: January 21, 1912 · Died: October 15, 2000

Famous Persons

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Overview

Legacy

He was the second child of middle-class parents Hedwig (Striemer) and Frederich D.

Who was Konrad Emil Bloch?

Konrad Emil Bloch (German pronunciation: [ˈkɔnʁaːt ˈblɔx] ; 21 January 1912 – 15 October 2000) was a German-American biochemist. Bloch was born in Neisse (now Nysa, Poland), in the German Empire's Prussian Province of Silesia into a Jewish family. He was a student at the Gymnasium Carolinum in Nysa and then 1930 to 1934, he studied chemistry at the Technical University of Munich. Later he was appointed to the department of biological chemistry at Yale Medical School. In the United States, Bloch enrolled at Columbia University, and received a PhD in biochemistry in 1938. He was the second child of middle-class parents Hedwig (Striemer) and Frederich D. "Fritz" Bloch. In 1934, due to the Nazi persecutions of Jews, he fled to the Schweizerische Forschungsinstitut in Davos, Switzerland, before moving to the United States in 1936. He taught at Columbia from 1939 to 1946.

Historical significance

Bloch received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1964 (joint with Feodor Lynen) for discoveries concerning the mechanism and regulation of the cholesterol and fatty acid metabolism.

Bloch with wife and children in Stockholm in 1964

Sources and further reading

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