Norman Lowther Edson
At Auckland Grammar School Edson won a Junior National Scholarship (1921) and was in the top ten Scholars for New Zealand.[6][7] In 1933 Edson won a Beit Memorial Medical Fellowship and spent two years at Cambridge University at the Sir William Dunn Institute of Biochemistry whose director was Frederick Gowland Hopkins.[8] In Cambridge, under Krebs' mentorship Edson conducted an extensive investigation on the metabolism of ketone bodies, substances produced in excess by humans during starvation or undiagnosed diabetes.Some of these studies (Edson and Leloir, 1936)[9] were a link in a chain of experiments leading to Krebs' 1937 proposal of the citric acid cycle.He subsequently told of hearing Ivan Pavlov speak and the destitution in the Moscow streets with the hungry placing their noses against the window looking at the plenty on the tables on the other side.His early work in New Zealand was devoted to the delineation of metabolic pathways of Mycobacteria, relatives of the tuberculosis bacterium.They carried out an extensive survey of the diversity of the polyol dehydrogenases and determined rules for the steric specificity of these enzymes.