Edwin G. Krebs

Edwin Gerhard Krebs (6 June 1918 to 21 December 2009) was an American biochemist. With his collaborator Edmond H. Fischer he was awarded the 1992 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for describing how reversible phosphorylation works as a switch that activates proteins and regulates many cellular processes. In 1989 he also received the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research and Columbia University's Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize, shared with Alfred Gilman. Krebs was born in Lansing, Iowa, the third child of a Presbyterian minister, and the family settled in Greenville, Illinois, until his father's unexpected death in 1933. In 1948 he became an assistant professor of biochemistry at the University of Washington in Seattle, and from 1953 he and Fischer studied the enzymology of phosphorylase together. His interest in teaching and administration later took him to the University of California, Davis, as founding chairman of its biochemistry department, and in 1977 he returned to the University of Washington as chairman of pharmacology.