- Person
- Otto Warburg
- Lived
- 1883–1970
- Field
- Biochemistry
- From
- German
The story
Otto Warburg was born in Freiburg in 1883, the son of the physicist Emil Warburg, and grew up in Berlin, where leading German scientists were frequent guests in his parents' home. He earned a doctorate in chemistry under Emil Fischer in Berlin in 1906 and a medical degree under Ludolf von Krehl in Heidelberg in 1911. Fischer's insistence on repeating experiments many times left a mark on him for life.
Between 1908 and 1914 Warburg was also affiliated with the marine biological station in Naples, the Stazione Zoologica, one of the great meeting points of European biology. There he chose a simple but revealing subject: the eggs of sea urchins, which marine biologists could study in large numbers in seawater.
Measuring the oxygen the eggs consumed, Warburg found that their respiration rises as much as sixfold at fertilisation, showing that the start of a new life is accompanied by a burst of chemical activity. He also showed that iron is essential to the development of the larvae. Between 1910 and 1914 he extended these studies of respiration to red blood cells and to the tiny granules inside cells that were later recognised as mitochondria, where the respiratory enzyme he would identify actually sits.
Naples stayed important to him. He returned on later visits and remained a lifelong friend of the family of the station's director, Anton Dohrn. When he left his cavalry regiment near the end of the First World War, his fellow officers joked that he would now go back to feeding sea urchins.
These early experiments set the direction of his career. The link between iron and respiration led him in 1924 to the iron-containing respiratory enzyme, the discovery that won him the 1931 Nobel Prize. A question first asked of sea urchin eggs in a seaside laboratory grew into an explanation of how every cell in the human body breathes.
Why it matters
Warburg's sea urchin studies helped establish the chemistry of fertilisation as a measurable science and pointed him toward the central role of iron in how cells breathe.
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 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 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
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.