Otto Fritz Meyerhof was born in Hannover, at Theaterplatz 16A (now:Rathenaustrasse 16A), the son of wealthy Jewish parents. In 1888, his family moved to Berlin, where Otto spent most of his childhood, and where he started his study of medicine. He continued these studies in Strasbourg and Heidelberg, from which he graduated in 1909, with a work titled “Contributions to the Psychological Theory of Mental Illness”. In Heidelberg, he met Hedwig Schallenberg. They married in 1914 and became parents of a daughter, Bettina, and two sons, Gottfried (who referred, after emigration, to himself as Geoffrey) as well as Walter.

In 1912, Otto Meyerhof moved to the University of Kiel, where he received a professorship in 1918. In 1922, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine, with Archibald Vivian Hill, for his work on muscle metabolism, including glycolysis. In 1929 he became one of the directors of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Medical Research, a position he held until 1938. Escaping the Nazi regime, he emigrated to Paris in 1938. He then moved to the United States in 1940, where he was appointed a guest professorship at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. In recognition of his contributions to the study of glycolysis, the common series of reactions for the pathway in Eukaryotes is known as the Embden–Meyerhof–Parnas Pathway.