Jakub Karol Parnas
Jakub Karol Parnas (also known as Yakov Oskarovich Parnas) was a Polish-Soviet biochemist who helped uncover the Embden–Meyerhof–Parnas pathway, the main route cells use to break down sugar for energy. He lived from January 16, 1884, to January 29, 1949.
Born in Tarnopol, then part of Austria-Hungary, Parnas studied in Berlin at the Königlich Technische Hochschule Charlottenburg and at ETH Zurich. From 1920 to 1941 he led the Institute of Medical Chemistry at Lviv University. He worked with scientists across Europe and was a member of several scientific academies, including the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, with honorary doctorates from Sorbonne University and the University of Athens.
After the Soviet Union annexed Western Ukraine in 1939, Parnas stayed in Lviv and cooperated with Soviet authorities. When Nazi Germany invaded in 1941, he moved deeper into the USSR and continued his work. Lviv later fell to the Nazis, who killed many local professors. In the USSR, Parnas became an Academician of the USSR Academy of Sciences and helped found the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences; he also joined the Union of Polish Patriots.
In 1949 he was arrested by the KGB and died the next day in Lubyanka prison in Moscow, reportedly during his first interrogation, from a heart attack.
Parnas’s major scientific contributions include studying how carbohydrates are metabolized in muscle, discovering phosphorolysis with Władysław Baranowski, and contributing to the theoretical analysis of glycolysis. He authored about 180 scientific works in several languages.
His legacy continues through the Polish–Ukrainian Parnas Conference, held every two years by biochemists from Poland and Ukraine, with Israeli participation since 2009. The conference has been hosted in Poland, Jerusalem, and Wrocław (2016).
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 23:44 (CET).