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Firm Foundation. Feodor Lynen, 53, head of biochemistry at the University of Munich and director of the Max-Planck-Institut für Zellchemie, is the son of a chemistry professor and married to the daughter of another, Heinrich Wieland, who won a Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1927. For years, until after World War II, Lynen's cholesterol work paralleled Bloch's without either man's knowing what the other was doing. When they began to publish results, it became clear that the two labs were working toward the same goal, but their approaches were different, and Dr. Lynen's Nobel citation singled out an aspect of his work that definitely does not overlap Bloch's: "His recent discovery of the biochemistry by which the vitamin biotin acts, which is fundamental in lipid [fat] metabolism, is in itself a discovery with the most far-reaching implications."
Sweden's Royal Caroline Institute, the medical school that is responsible for selecting Nobel winners in physiology and medicine, was understandably careful not to go out on a limb because of the raging controversies over cholesterol and cooking fats. But it declared: "Circulatory diseases are the foremost cause of death in many areas of the world. The great majority of these cases have a gravely disturbed lipid metabolism. The prerequisite for correcting a faulty function is to know the intimate details of the mechanisms involved. The therapy against these circulatory diseases and related disturbances in steroid hormone metabolism will in the future rest upon the firm foundation laid by Bloch and Lynen."