Born in Neisse, Germany, in 1912. Educated at the Technische Hochschule in Munich, fled the Nazis in 1934 and went to the Schweizerische Forschungsinstitut in Davos, Switzerland, before moving to the United States in 1936. Appointed to the department of biological chemistry at Yale Medical School. In America he enrolled at Columbia University, he received a Ph.D. in biochemistry in 1938. He taught at Columbia from 1939 to 1946. From there he went to the university of Chicago and then to Harvard University as Higgins Professor of Biochemistry in 1954, a post he held until his retirement in 1982
He shared the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology in 1964 with Feodor Lynen, for their discoveries concerning the mechanism and regulation of the cholesterol and fatty acid metabolism.
He died on October 15, 2000 in Burlington, Massachusetts of congestive heart failure.