He was born on 21 January 1912 in Nysa, Prussian Silesia, German Empire (today Poland). He studied at the Technical University in Munich from 1930 to 1934. He fled to the "Schweizerische Forschungsinstitut" in Davos, Switzerland in 1934 because of the Nazi persecutions of Jews. He then moved to the United States in 1936. While in the United States, he joined the department of biological chemistry at Yale Medical School.