Konrad Bloch; Won Nobel for Cholesterol Research

Konrad Bloch, 88, who shared a Nobel Prize for research leading to development of cholesterol-lowering drugs. Bloch, a native of Neisse, Germany (now Nysa, Poland), shared the Nobel in physiology and medicine with Feodor Lynen in 1964 for their independent work on the metabolism of cholesterol and fatty acids. Bloch earned an undergraduate degree in chemical engineering in Munich before fleeing the rise of Nazism. He lived in Switzerland for two years and moved to the United States in 1936, earning a doctorate in biochemistry at Columbia University and becoming a naturalized U.S. citizen. After teaching and doing research at Columbia and the University of Chicago and a year’s study in Zurich on a Guggenheim Fellowship, Bloch joined the faculty at Harvard in 1954, where he continued his research for three decades. Using radioisotopes with bread mold fungus, dogfish and rats’ livers, Bloch was able to unravel the biosynthetic conversion of acetate into cholesterol. His discoveries, which two colleagues described as “an outline for the chemistry of life,” enabled development of drugs in use today for treating dangerously high levels of cholesterol that can cause heart attacks and strokes. Bloch was an editor of the Journal of Biological Chemistry and worked with sections of the National Research Council and the United States Public Health Service. On Sunday in Boston of congestive heart failure.