Otto Warburg Claims He Discovered Secret of Cancer

Prof. Otto H. Warburg, 71, winner of the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1931, reports in a German scientific journal today that he has solved the bitterly-disputed question as to the origin of cancer. For a quarter century he has directed the Institute for Cell Physiology in the Dahlem section of Berlin, formerly known as the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. In 1948-49 he carried out researches in the United States.

According to the famed biochemist and physiologist, who has studied the processes of living cells for more than three decades and is considered the world’s foremost authority on the subject, cancer does not develop through outside causative agents such as viruses. It sets in when a cell does not absorb enough oxygen, so that its normal “breathing” is chronically impaired. His findings, he believes, show the way toward future prevention of the disease.

Final proof of his thesis was furnished recently, he indicates, when American researchers Harry Goldblatt and Gladys Cameron, the latter a biologist connected with New York University, were able to induce tumors artificially by impairing the “breathing” of healthy cells. Dr. Goldblatt, a distinguished pathologist born at Muscatine, Iowa, in 1891, is on the staff of the Institute for Medical Research at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Los Angeles.

Prof, Warburg, a doctor of both chemistry and medicine, remained in Berlin throughout the Nazi regime, escaping the more truculent measures of persecution because of hs half-Jewish descent.