ABSTRACT
My contact with Krebs to begin with was merely as a medical student who was very enthused by biochemistry and the excitement of Krebs. The psychiatric connection came through Gjessing. Rolv Gjessing was very famous then, but is hardly known now. He came from Norway to see Krebs and he took Krebs to begin with to Middlewood Hospital, the local 2000-3000- bed mental hospital, to see, of course, that there were more patients in beds there than in all the rest of the hospitals put together in that period. He tried to encourage Krebs to study mental illness. Krebs obviously wasn’t going to do that because he was still trying to decide whether succinic acid fitted in the tricarboxcylic acid cycle or not, and he was doing this work with yeast. But they both got the bishop to complain about the bad conditions of patients ofthat period, and Krebs became enamoured by the scientific attitude of Gjessing, who he thought was taking the sort of clear-cut scientific attitude you should take. Krebs was totally opposed to using statistics in science. He said they were used following bad experiments, which demonstrated very little. Gjessing, of course, was selecting patients very carefully and showing he could cure people who had long-term periodic catatonia of a clearly defined type - this was very exciting then - by giving them massive doses of thyroxine. This is almost forgotten now, but I can assure you that it worked. He gave them thyroxine in doses rising daily from 1 to 10 mg. I thought it was like giving people straight electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). The pulse rates went up to 180 and everyone in the place was nervous about whether they were going to survive.
