It was 1945, and Hans Kornberg - who fled Nazi Germany in 1939 at the age of 11 - was trying to figure out what to do next. He had been turned on to chemistry by a fierce, pipe-smoking teacher at the grammar school he attended in Yorkshire. He wanted to continue his studies, but he didn't have the funds to enroll in a university. That's when serendipity stepped in.
"My cousin happened to be a technician-secretary to a young scientist, a biochemist, at the University of Sheffield," says Kornberg. That biochemist was Hans Krebs. Kornberg's cousin told him that Krebs was looking for a junior technician. "I applied and was summoned for interview and asked all sorts of penetrating questions, like, 'Do you know how many carbons there are in citric acid?' And I thought that as a result of the brilliance of my responses I was appointed to ...
