(Editor) Oct 23 2019Ī new study, led by researchers at the University of Chicago, provides an answer to why cancer cells consume and use nutrients differently than their healthy counterparts and how that difference contributes to their survival and growth.Īll cells need to generate energy to keep living, but cancer cells have an increased demand for energy in order to grow and multiply quickly. And like Frank J Wilson before them - the only accountant I can think of - they got their Al Capones.Reviewed by Kate Anderton, B.Sc. Warburg, Krebs, and the rest were biochemistry’s forensic accountants. He became increasingly rigid and eccentric, worried about his diet, and was an early adopter of organic food.īut his manometers, used for scores of different assays, remained a fixture in biochemistry labs for decades, only falling out of favour with the advent of gas-sensitive microelectrodes. As he aged, Warburg’s interest in cancer began to border on the obsessive. Warburg struggled on through the Nazi period, the disasters of the second world war, and beyond. The citric acid cycle would become the central nexus of biochemical physiology, and earn him the 1953 Nobel prize in physiology. After dozens of seemingly contradictory experiments, Krebs realised that the respiratory process must be a cycle passing through eight distinct intermediates, rather than a chain. Krebs began monitoring the effect of adding a variety of known respiratory intermediates and enzyme inhibitors to his slices of cells. Among them was the young Hans Krebs, who sailed to England in 1933 with a precious cargo of 30 manometers. Yet even as his fame was at its height, some of Warburg’s Jewish co-workers began to suffer from discrimination, while Warburg, perhaps because of his cancer research, was reclassified an Aryan. His brilliant and methodical work led to a Nobel prize for medicine in 1931.
He also stiffened the device to allow shaking in a thermostatic bath while the fluid - not mercury but the much less dense, so more sensitive, sodium chloride with a little bile salt - rose or fell.Īlthough fiddly to use, Warburg manometers were the mainstay of biochemical analysis for decades The reagent chamber was built into the stopper of the flask turning the stopper released the reagent onto the sample. He connected a small flask directly to the manometer, ditching rubber tubing. In 1910, the English physiologist Thomas Gregor Brodie improved on John Scott Haldane’s blood gas analyser (see Chemistry World, August 2010, p68). Up to this time respiration had been studied rather clumsily by titrimetry.
It was an astute choice because of their particularly fast growth. He moved to Heidelberg in 1906 to study medicine, and developed an interest in respiration, often using sea urchin eggs in his studies. Warburg was meticulous, patient and technically brilliant. He studied with Emil Fischer, making the first chiral peptides and studying their hydrolysis. Through his father, Otto met many of the greatest scientists of the day. Otto Warburg was the son of a leading German physicist, Emil, who was on friendly terms with Albert Einstein and worked with Max Planck. In biochemistry, one vital accounting tool - Warburg’s manometer - stands head and shoulders above the rest, because it revealed the true beauty and interconnectedness of the metabolic pathways that drive life on earth. But before we get too snooty, it is worth remembering how crucial careful book-keeping has been to so many of the major concepts in chemistry, from stoichiometry to thermodynamics.