William Arthur Johnson (biochemist)
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William Arthur Johnson was a British biochemist. He was best known as the co-discoverer of the Krebs cycle along with his supervisor Hans Krebs.[1]
Johnson was born in Stockton-on-Tees, England in 1913. He studied chemistry at the University of Sheffield, receiving a first-class honours degree. Following a period of teacher training, Johnson was accepted as a postgraduate student of Krebs in the Department of Pharmacology at Sheffield in 1935.[2]
Work on the Krebs cycle
Krebs taught Johnson the relevant manometry techniques at Sheffield, which Krebs himself had learnt in Otto Heinrich Warburg's laboratory at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Biology in Berlin.[1][2]
The research in the laboratory at Sheffield involved long hours of repetitive work where manometry was used to determine the oxygen consumption of tissue slices of pigeon breast muscle. The majority of data relevant to the Krebs cycle findings were collected by Johnson, whereas Krebs provided the overall direction and intellectual stimulus for the research, according to an interview conducted with Johnson in 1993.[1][2]
Krebs and Johnson attempted to publish their findings in Nature in 1937, but the journal rejected their submission due to already having a backlog of accepted submissions, meaning that the journal was at capacity for several weeks to come.[3][4] Instead they chose to publish their paper The role of citric acid in intermediate metabolism in animal tissues in the Dutch journal Enzymologia.[5]
Johnson's PhD thesis, completed in 1938, was based on his work with Krebs and was titled Studies in the Intermediate Metabolism of Carbohydrates. His thesis included an early schematic diagram of the Krebs cycle.[2]