- Person
- Otto Warburg
- Lived
- 1883–1970
- Field
- Biochemistry
- From
- German
The story
Every cell in the body burns fuel with oxygen, but in the early twentieth century no one knew what chemical machinery made this possible. Otto Warburg, trained in chemistry under Emil Fischer and in medicine at Heidelberg, first met the question while studying the respiration of sea urchin eggs in Naples before the First World War, where he found that iron was essential to their development. After serving as a cavalry officer in the war, he became a professor at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Biology in Berlin-Dahlem in 1918.
In 1924 Warburg concluded that iron was the oxygen-transferring part of a respiratory enzyme, which he called the Atmungsferment and later the iron oxygenase. Experiments with carbon monoxide, which blocks respiration by binding to the iron, convinced him in 1926 that the enzyme was a haem compound, a chemical relative of the pigment that makes blood red. By using light to lift the carbon monoxide block, he then measured the enzyme's absorption spectrum inside living cells, confirming its nature without ever isolating it. The enzyme activates oxygen so that it can react with the products of food, the central step of cellular respiration.
The Nobel Committee awarded him the 1931 Prize in Physiology or Medicine, unshared, for his discovery of the nature and mode of action of the respiratory enzyme. The prize followed 46 nominations over nine years beginning in 1923, 13 of them submitted in 1931 alone. The same year he became director of the new Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Cell Physiology, created with a donation from the Rockefeller Foundation.
Warburg himself regarded the respiratory enzyme as the most original of his many discoveries. He went on to show that flavins and nicotinamide are the active groups of the enzymes that transfer hydrogen, and his Nobel biography notes that these findings, together with the iron oxygenase, gave a complete account of oxidation and reduction in living things.
His work became a cornerstone of biochemistry. It explains at the molecular level how living things turn oxygen and food into usable energy, and why poisons such as carbon monoxide and cyanide, both of which attack the iron of the respiratory machinery, are so dangerous.
Why it matters
Understanding cellular respiration underpins modern medicine's grasp of metabolism, from how poisons such as carbon monoxide and cyanide act to how muscles, brains and hearts are fuelled.
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 built the tools of modern biochemistryOtto Warburg introduced the thin tissue-slice technique in 1923 and refined manometric methods for measuring how living tissue consumes oxygen, tools used in labs for decades.
- 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
- Otto Heinrich Warburg Wikipedia
- Warburg, Otto Heinrich, Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography Encyclopedia.com
- Otto Warburg, Biographical NobelPrize.org
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.