Anyone studying medicine has to wade through the river that biochemistry has been steadily widening since the 19th century. Even before future doctors get to see their first patients, they have to memorize what the textbooks present on narrowly printed pages with often incomprehensible names.
We are talking, for example, about a urea cycle that was discovered by the German biochemist Hans Krebs in the early 1930s, before the later Nobel Prize winner turned his attention to the question of how a cell obtains its energy through chemical transformations. Because the Nazis thought they had no use for Jewish scientists, the Krebs cycle - the monster for all medical students - saw the light of day under British skies. The Krebs cycle exerts its aversion on first-year students because it is full of names like succinate, pyruvate, alpha-ketoglutamate, oxaloacetate and others that are soon forgotten - unless someone explains the miracle that life has created and holds in store in the Krebs cycle.
Admittedly, if you look up cancer in a biochemistry textbook and search not for the horrible disease but for the shiny scientist, you will mainly come across a swirling variety of tricky names and at best find in the small print that life is playing with fire here, which is exciting enough. The Krebs cycle shows how life burns something, as the chemists say, when oxygen is bound, but in this process the cells must tread carefully so as not to let the body they form go up in flames.
At a time when politicians are increasingly concerned with supplying people with energy, people also want to know how life itself obtains its energy. When the biochemists set about the task in earnest and wanted to know how the associated circular motion arose in the course of evolution, they were able to make an exciting discovery. They found bacteria that run the Krebs cycle in the opposite direction, using energy to produce the molecules that enable them to shape their lives. The Krebs cycle provides energy and information as needed by students who have to memorize it. Perhaps now they will begin not to hate it, but to love it.
