Fischer, Edmond Henri (1920-2021), was an American biochemist who, with his colleague Edwin G. Krebs, made important discoveries about how cell proteins regulate muscle contractions. He and Krebs shared the 1992 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for their discoveries.
Fischer was born on April 6, 1920, in Shanghai, China, where his father published a French-language newspaper. When Edmond was 7 years old, his parents sent him to boarding school in Switzerland, and he completed his education in that country. Fischer graduated from the University of Geneva with degrees in biology and chemistry and earned a Ph.D. degree in chemistry there in 1947. For the next several years, he devoted himself to research in organic chemistry, supported by research fellowships from the Swiss National Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation.
In 1953, Fischer went to the United States to do research in biology at the California Institute of Technology. Later that year, he moved to the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Washington to teach and conduct research. Krebs was already on the faculty, and in 1954, the two scientists began the work that eventually won the Nobel Prize. They studied the biochemistry of muscle contractions, which take place when a muscle enzyme called phosphorylase is activated. Phosphorylase releases stored energy and causes the muscle to contract. Fischer and Krebs found that phosphorylase is switched on by another enzyme, one of a group of proteins known as protein kinases. This switching process is known as protein phosphorylation. Fischer eventually became a United States citizen. In 1990, he retired from the University of Washington. Fischer died on Aug. 27, 2021.
