Science Nobelist Fritz A. Lipmann Dies : Research Led to Understanding of Conversion of Food to Energy

Fritz Albert Lipmann, whose research helped scientists understand how cells convert food into energy, died Thursday after a short illness. He was 87.

The co-winner of the 1953 Nobel Prize for medicine and physiology died in a hospital here, near his home in Rhinebeck, N.Y. He was professor emeritus at Rockefeller University in New York City and was running a laboratory in the university and conducting research shortly before his death.

He shared the Nobel with British biologist Sir Hans Adolf Krebs, who like Lipmann was born in Germany, for the discovery of coenzyme A, one of the most important substances in the body’s metabolism.

The substance aids in converting fatty acids, steroids, amino acids and hemoglobins into energy.

Although Krebs and Lipmann won the prize jointly, they conducted their research independently. Krebs died in England in 1981.

In 1966, President Lyndon B. Johnson presented Lipmann with the National Medal of Science, the nation’s highest award for scientific achievement, “for original discoveries of molecular mechanisms . . . and for fundamental contributions to the conceptual structure of modern biochemistry.”

Lipmann joined the Rockefeller University in 1957 and became professor emeritus in 1970. He was conducting research at the Harvard Medical School when he won the Nobel Prize.

He was born in Koenigsberg, Germany, and educated in Munich and Copenhagen, earning a doctorate in chemistry and a medical degree.

He moved to the United States in 1939 and became a citizen in 1944.

He was a fellow of the New York Academy of Science and the Danish Royal Academy of Sciences and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Lipmann’s autobiography, “Wanderings of a Biochemist,” was published in 1971.