Another Nobel Prize for Medicine Goes to Research-worker of Jewish Origin: Professor Otto Warburg Me

Professor Otto Warburg, of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine for 1931.

Professor Warburg is not himself a Jew, but he is of Jewish origin, and distantly related to the Warburg family, of which Mr. Felix M. Warburg, Mr. Max Warburg, Professor Otto Warburg of the Hebrew University, and other famous Jewish personages are members. He was baptised while he was a child.

Professor Warburg’s activities were paid tribute to in 1929 by the Imperial Cancer Research Fund in London in its annual report. A valuable piece of work, it said, has been the confirmation of the important discovery by Professor Otto Warburg that cancer cells possess the faculty of splitting sugar into lactic acid to a far greater extent than normal cells, a reaction into which oxygen does not enter. A study of the metabolism of the pure cancer-celled tumours possessed by the Fund’s laboratory, it proceeded, has confirmed Professor Warburg’s findings, and a highly important bio-chemical property of malignant cells hitherto unsuspected has thus come to light.

Last year’s Nobel Prize for Medicine went to Professor Landsteiher, of the Rockefeller Medical Research Institute of New York, who is a Jew.