- Person
- Otto Warburg
- Lived
- 1883–1970
- Field
- Biochemistry
- From
- German
The story
After explaining how cells activate oxygen, Otto Warburg turned to the other half of the chemistry of respiration: how cells remove hydrogen from food molecules so that it can eventually combine with oxygen and release energy. From 1931 he directed the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Cell Physiology in Berlin-Dahlem, and the decade that followed brought a remarkable run of discoveries.
In 1932 Warburg and his colleague Walter Christian discovered a yellow protein from yeast that was needed for cell respiration, the first of the so-called yellow enzymes, and the same year his laboratory achieved the first crystallisation of a flavin, the yellow pigment at their core. In 1935 he identified nicotinamide as the active group of the hydrogen-transferring enzymes and studied how such coenzymes bind to their proteins. Optical methods he developed between 1935 and 1937, based on the ultraviolet absorption of the reduced form of nicotinamide, gave biochemists a simple way to follow these reactions. In 1938 his group isolated and crystallised flavin adenine dinucleotide, the coenzyme now known as FAD, which cells build from riboflavin, vitamin B2.
The laboratory also crystallised a series of fermentation enzymes, among them enolase in 1941 and enzymes from muscle and tumours in the early 1940s, and worked out key steps in the way sugar is broken down during fermentation.
Warburg's Nobel biography states that the flavins and nicotinamide, together with the iron oxygenase he had found earlier, gave a complete account of oxidation and reduction in the living world. In 1944 Albert Szent-Györgyi, himself a Nobel laureate, nominated Warburg for a second Nobel Prize for the work on nicotinamide, the fermentation enzymes and the flavin of the yellow enzymes. According to the Nobel Foundation he was considered a worthy candidate but was not chosen that year, despite a later story that he had been selected and then blocked by the Nazi regime.
These coenzymes, built from vitamins, turned out to be essential to energy production in virtually every living cell. Together, these findings helped complete the chemical picture of how cells carry out oxidation and reduction.
Why it matters
FAD and the nicotinamide coenzymes are central to every textbook account of metabolism, and Warburg's work helped explain why vitamins such as riboflavin are vital to health.
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 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.
Sources
- Warburg, Otto Heinrich, Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography Encyclopedia.com
- Otto Heinrich Warburg Wikipedia
- Flavin adenine dinucleotide Wikipedia
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.