Ravenous by Sam Apple

Author:Sam Apple [Apple, Sam]
Language: eng
Format: epub

WARBURG WAS NOW so convinced he was right about cancer that the mere thought of considering other approaches seemed ridiculous to him. In 1953, the Nobel Prize–winning German biochemist Adolf Butenandt reached out to Warburg about founding a new cancer research center in Germany. Warburg told Butenandt that there was no point, given that he had already solved the cancer problem.

And so the events of the last week of 1953 could only have come as a terrible shock for Warburg. While most Americans were celebrating the holidays with family, a number of the nation’s leading scientists were huddled in Boston at a cancer symposium. One of the scientists in attendance was Sidney Weinhouse, an unassuming researcher working at a cancer institute in Pennsylvania. Weinhouse had recently studied respiration in cancer cells with a new tool, radioactive carbon molecules, that made it possible to make even more precise measurements.

When it was Weinhouse’s turn to present his data at the Boston symposium, he did not dispute Warburg’s most fundamental claim, that cancer cells ferment more. But he did dispute Warburg’s argument that fermentation was a cell’s response to a struggle to generate energy with oxygen. The cancer cells Weinhouse studied appeared to be breathing just fine.

Weinhouse’s conclusion was essentially a confirmation of what Warburg had found in the early 1920s—that respiration continued even as cancer cells fermented—but it was a stark refutation of Warburg’s more recent finding on the cancer cells taken from abdominal fluid. Warburg was claiming that fermentation replaced respiration in cancer cells, Weinhouse that fermentation accompanied respiration. The next week a science newsletter summarized Weinhouse’s findings under the headline “Cancer Theory Overthrown.” Dean Burk immediately wrote to Warburg to let him know about the insurrection. “Weinhouse,” Burk wrote, “is your ‘cancer Emerson.’ ”7

For Weinhouse, it might have been nothing more than a minor correction to an important scientific discovery. But Warburg couldn’t tolerate corrections. As far as Warburg was concerned, Weinhouse had declared war. A year later, Warburg proclaimed his victory in that war in a speech delivered in Stuttgart:

What was formerly only qualitative has now become quantitative. What was formerly only probable has now become certain. The era in which the fermentation of the cancer cells or its importance could be disputed is over, and no one today can doubt that we understand the origin of cancer cells if we know how their large fermentation originates, or, to express it more fully, if we know how the damaged respiration and the excessive fermentation of the cancer cells originate.8

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