Jakub Karol Parnas

Jakub Karol Parnas
Jakub Karol Parnas Memorial
Born	(1884-01-16)January 16, 1884 Mokriany, Austro-Hungarian Empire
Died	January 29, 1949(1949-01-29) (aged 65) Moscow, USSR
Residence	Poland, USSR
Nationality	Poland, USSR
Alma mater	Royal Technical College of Charlottenburg
Doctoral advisor	in Munich University
Known for	Embden–Meyerhof–Parnas pathway

Jakub Karol Parnas, also known as Yakov Oskarovich Parnas (Russian: Яков Оскарович Парнас) (January 16, 1884 – January 29, 1949) was a prominent Jewish-Polish–Soviet biochemist who contributed to the discovery of the Embden–Meyerhof–Parnas pathway, together with Otto Fritz Meyerhof and Gustav Georg Embden. He became a Soviet activist after the annexation of Western Ukraine in 1939, but he was murdered during the Stalinist Doctors' Plot purge in 1949.

Parnas was born in 1884 in Mokriany near Drohobych, at that time part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in the province of Galicia (now split between Poland and Ukraine), to Jewish parents. He graduated from the Royal Technical College of Charlottenburg in 1904. From 1920 to 1941, he was head of the Institute of the Medical Chemistry at Lviv University. He traveled across Europe, collaborating with universities in Cambridge, Naples, Strasbourg, Ghent and Zurich. He was a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, Corresponding Member of the Polish Academy of Sciences, as well an honorary doctor of Sorbonne University and the University of Athens.