Otto Warburg

Origins and early life

Otto Heinrich Warburg was born in Freiburg im Breisgau on 8 October 1883.

Work and career

His father was the physicist Emil Warburg, of the illustrious Warburg family of Altona, whose own parents were Orthodox Jews and who had converted to Protestantism as an adult; his mother came from a Protestant family of bankers and officials in Baden — that paternal line is the route by which he appears here. He read chemistry under Emil Fischer and took a doctorate in Berlin in 1906, then studied medicine under Ludolf von Krehl and qualified at Heidelberg in 1911, spending the years between at the marine biological station in Naples.

A lifelong horseman, he served as an officer in the Uhlan cavalry in the First World War and was decorated with the Iron Cross. His instruments made his science: he built manometers delicate enough to read the oxygen a slice of living tissue consumes, and with them measured respiration as a rate rather than inferring it.

Recognition

He identified the iron-bearing enzyme that carries out the oxygen transfer in the cell, and was awarded the 1931 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, after forty-six nominations across nine years. He also found that tumours produce large amounts of lactic acid even with oxygen present, a fact still argued over as the Warburg effect. Under the Nuremberg laws of 1935 he was classified Mischling, banned from teaching but allowed to keep his laboratory, and he stayed in Berlin through the war and after it, dying there on 1 August 1970.