Hugo Theorell

He married Elin Margit Elilsabeth Alenius Theorell in 1931. Elin Margit was a pianist by profession. They had a daughter, Eva Kristina Theorell and three sons whose names were Klas Thure Gabriel, Henning Hugo and Per Gunnar Tores Theorell. Hugo passed away in Stockholm.

Born in Linkoping, Sweden, Hugo Theorell was the son of Thure Theorell, a surgeon-major to the First Life Grenadiers in Linkoping and Armida Bill. Hugo attended a State Secondary School in Linkoping for nine years.

He cleared his matriculation examination from that school on May 23, 1921. In the same year, he took admission at the Karolinska Institute to study medicine. In 1924, he graduated as a Bachelor of Medicine.

After a brief period, he started working as an assistant at the Institute of Medical Chemistry at Stockholm. From 1928 to 1929, he served as a temporary associate professor at this institute.

After that, he studied bacteriology under Professor Calmette for three months at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. He became an M.D. in 1930. The subject of his thesis was the lipids of the blood plasma.

After completing his M.D., he worked as a lecturer in psychological chemistry at the Karolinska Institute. It was Hugo who for the first time noticed the presence of crystalline myoglobin while pursuing research works in Svedberg’s Institute of Physical Chemistry in Uppsala, Sweden in 1931.

In the following year, he worked as associate professor of medical and psychological chemistry at the University of Uppsala. Later, from 1933 to 1935, he worked as a Rockefeller Fellow in the laboratory of Otto Warburg at Berlin-Dahlem.

At that time, he pursued research on oxidation enzymes. In 1934, with the application of his own electrophoretic methods, he purified and crystallized a yellow colored enzyme found in yeast.

Moreover, he separated lactoflavin, a pigment part of that enzyme from the colorless protein carrier. His research established the fact that the portion of lactoflavin was a type of protein.

Based on its chemical structure, he named the substance as flavin mononucleotide. In 1937, he acted as the director of the Biochemical Department of the Nobel Medical Institute in Stockholm.

This renowned scientist of Swedish origin had a special interest in music and was a member of the Swedish Royal Academy of music. Moreover, he was also well known as a talented violinist.