Feodor Lynen was born in Munich, Germany on April 6., 1911. He died there, August 6. 1979. Feodor Lynen's main research interest was the metabolism of cholesterol and fatty-acids. In 1951 he succeeded in isolating acetyl CoA from yeast. He made important contributions to the elucidation of the ß-oxidation pathway and much of our present knowledge of the mechanism of biotin-dependent carboxylations stems from his work on ß-methylcrotonyl CoA carboxylase.
From 1947 Lynen was professor at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich and from 1954 he was director of the Max-Planck Institute for Cellular Chemistry. When the Max-Planck Institute for Biochemistry was built in 1972, his department moved to Martinsried in the soutwest outskirts of Munich. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine in 1964, together with Konrad Bloch: "for their discoveries concerning the mechanism and regulation of the cholesterol and fatty acid metabolism".
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