Transformer by Nick Lane

Author:Nick Lane [Lane, Nick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781788160544
Publisher: Profile
Published: 2022-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Warburg effect

Otto Warburg was a genius. He could have won the Nobel prize three times and it would not have been undeserving. In some respects, he was half a century ahead of his time. From the 1930s, he advocated quitting smoking, avoiding pollution from vehicles, eating healthily (he shunned fertilisers), exercising regularly and supplementing one’s diet with B group vitamins (which help form NADH, the hydrogen currency in cells, also discovered by Warburg himself). His explanation for cancer has come back into fashion over the last decade, with a near-exponential rise in the number of papers citing the so-called ‘Warburg effect’ – the tendency of cancer cells to behave like yeast, fermenting glucose rather than respiring, even when oxygen is present. That’s to say nothing of his many other discoveries, including much of the other hardware for respiration and fermentation. He was also an extraordinary mentor for numerous other scientists, many of whom went on to win the Nobel prize themselves, including Krebs himself.

Yet Warburg also illustrates the problem with a simplistic notion of right and wrong in science. He was forceful in his views, and his dogmatism meant that he would argue rather than listen, sometimes for decades. His haughtiness was no doubt attributable in part to his extraordinary upbringing in Imperial Germany before the Great War. His father Emil was a distinguished physicist, whose own parents were Orthodox Jews; Emil had apparently converted to Protestantism after arguing with his parents. Otto’s mother was from a Protestant family of military and governmental officials from south Germany, and was both sociable and resolute. In 1896, the family moved to Berlin when Emil became Director of the Institute of Physics. As a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences, Emil became close friends with some of the scientific celebrities of the age. The cancer biologist Angela Otto wrote:

The house of the Warburgs was the site of vibrant social evenings, where Einstein played the violin, Planck played the piano, and other colleagues such as J. H. van’t Hoff and Walter Nernst contributed to the musical, literary and philosophical entertainment. No doubt these guests seeded and fostered Otto’s interest in natural science and molded his personality.

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