- Person
- Otto Warburg
- Lived
- 1883–1970
- Field
- Biochemistry
- From
- German
The story
Otto Warburg liked to describe himself as an artisan and a technician rather than a theorist. He believed that many important discoveries could be made through simple variations in experimental conditions that no one had yet tried, and he spent much of his career inventing the tools to make them. His biographer in the Dictionary of Scientific Biography called him first and foremost a pioneer of biochemical methods.
Measuring how living cells breathe was a basic problem. Cells consume oxygen and give off carbon dioxide in tiny volumes, too small to measure accurately by ordinary means. From about 1918 to 1920 Warburg developed biochemical manometry, in which cells or tissue sat in a sealed flask connected to a fine pressure gauge that recorded the minute changes in gas pressure as oxygen was taken up or carbon dioxide released. The apparatus, now known as the Warburg manometer, could measure the respiration of cells, tissues or tissue extracts, and he went on refining the method for the rest of his life.
In 1923 he added the thin tissue-slice technique. By cutting organs such as liver, or tumours, into sections thin enough for oxygen to reach every cell, he could study their metabolism outside the body under controlled conditions. Together the slices and the manometer made it possible to measure respiration and fermentation precisely and repeatably, and they were the tools behind his discovery that tumours produce large amounts of lactic acid. He also developed an inhibition technique using carbon monoxide, which, like the manometer, came into wide use among biochemists around the world.
Generations of researchers relied on these methods. Hans Krebs, who worked in Warburg's laboratory from 1926 to 1930, took a Warburg manometer with him when he left Nazi Germany in 1933, and in Sheffield he used it to test one hypothesis after another until he had worked out the citric acid cycle in 1937. Warburg also introduced spectrophotometric methods for identifying enzymes and other cell constituents, along with techniques for isolating and crystallising enzymes.
Long before modern cell culture and electronic sensors became routine, Warburg's apparatus let scientists put precise numbers on the chemistry of real living tissue, and his manometer and tissue slices stayed in laboratory use for decades.
Why it matters
Warburg's tools turned metabolism into a measurable science and supported discoveries across biochemistry, physiology and cancer research for half a century.
About Otto Warburg
Biochemist who uncovered how cells breathe and discovered that tumours burn sugar by fermentation, the “Warburg effect”; Nobel laureate in 1931 who kept working in Nazi Berlin as a “Mischling.”
More about Otto Warburg
- Otto Warburg found that cancer cells crave sugarBeginning in 1922, Otto Warburg discovered that tumour cells break down glucose into lactic acid even when oxygen is plentiful, a hallmark of cancer now called the Warburg effect.
- Otto Warburg's discovery lets PET scans find tumoursPET scans locate cancers by tracking a radioactive form of glucose that tumours absorb in excess, putting Otto Warburg's century-old discovery to work in hospitals every day.
- Otto Warburg used light to unmask an invisible enzymeOtto Warburg showed that carbon monoxide blocks cell breathing and that light lifts the block, and used this trick to read the chemical signature of the respiratory enzyme.
- Otto Warburg discovered how cells use oxygenOtto Warburg identified the iron-containing enzyme that lets living cells use oxygen, winning the unshared 1931 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
- Otto Warburg measured life's first breath in an eggWorking at the Naples marine station before the First World War, Otto Warburg showed that a sea urchin egg's respiration rises sharply the moment it is fertilised.
- Otto Warburg revealed the helper molecules of metabolismIn the 1930s Otto Warburg discovered the yellow enzymes and identified flavin and nicotinamide as the active parts of the enzymes that move hydrogen in living cells.
Sources
- Warburg, Otto Heinrich, Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography Encyclopedia.com
- Otto Heinrich Warburg Wikipedia
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