Nobel Prize

For ten years a dispute raged between the University of Munich's Dr. Heinrich Wieland and Dr. Otto H. Warburg of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Biology in Berlin, over the question whether cellular respiration requires iron. Dr. Warburg has maintained that it does; Dr. Wieland claimed it does not. Three years ago Dr. Wieland was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry--not for cellular research, but for study of cholic acid contained in the bile. Last week Dr. Warburg won the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine. The award was made for his studies of cell respiration which proved that he was right, Dr. Wieland wrong.

The cell is the anatomical unit of life of which all living matter is constituted. Living cells breathe. Dr. Warburg set out to discover how that breathing takes place. He found that respiration is possible only in the presence of the iron carried by a specific enzyme, the chemistry of which he worked out. Said Dr. Warburg last week: "It was only recently that I found out how the difference had arisen. Wieland as a chemist worked on dead cell material. When you destroy living cells you get a juice in which combustible materials such as sugar are much more highly concentrated than in the living cell, and by virtue of that higher concentration respiration in that liquid can take place in the absence of iron. ... In the living cell such a high concentration never occurs --and to breathe the living cell must have iron."

Last year the Nobel Prize in Medicine went to Rockefeller Institute's Dr. Karl Landsteiner. The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute is also endowed (for $640.000) by the Rockefeller Institute. There Dr. Warburg has studied tumor cells, has found that cancerous cells can exist and multiply for a limited time altogether without oxidation (a condition which is also true of some normal cells and which therefore is not the explanation of cancer). He is 48, has been head of the biology department of the Institute for 21 years. He is the son of the late great Physicist Emil Warburg.

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