Since the Nobel Prize was instituted (1901) until Hitler came to power (1933), Germany concentrated a third of the distinctions. Among the awardees were Albert Einstein y Max Planckpersonal friends of the physicist Emil Warburgand his own son Otto.
In 1931 the Academy awarded Otto Heinrich Warburg (1883-1970) the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for revealing one of the secrets of cancer. When he found out that he had been awarded, he couldn’t help but exclaim, “It’s about time.”
This scientist defended the hypothesis that cancer and tumor growth were caused because neoplastic cells generate energy mainly through the non-oxidative degradation of glucose (anaerobic glycolysis), contrary to what happens in healthy cells, which they do thanks to the oxidative degradation of pyruvate. In some way, Warburg argued that cancer was a metabolic problem.
Untouchable for the Nazis
Otto belonged to a wealthy Jewish family of Portuguese origin whose lineage dated back to the year 1500. They first settled in the Venice ghetto and then in Warburg, near the Dutch border, from where they took the name of the city as own self.
When the Nazis came to power, and while some of his Jewish colleagues fled Germany, Otto Warburg lived with his mistress, Jacob Heiss, in an 18th-century Rococo mansion located in the elegant Dahlem district, in the southeast of the German capital.
A binomial – Jewish and homosexual – that placed Warburg in the crosshairs of the Nazi authorities. However, he remained in his university position, indifferent to the fate of the Jews in Germany. And it is that his line of work and the hypochondria of the Führer They played in their favor.
Adolf Hitler He was a character full of contradictions, vegetarian, teetotaler, nonchalant combatant of smoking and oncophobic. On one occasion he underwent surgery for a laryngeal polyp that turned out to be benign, but the possibility that it might turn malignant undoubtedly played a role in protecting Otto Warburg from racial fury.
eccentric and arrogant
Warburg turned down an offer from the Rockefeller Foundation to continue his research in New York, leading the scientific community to believe he was sympathetic to Nazism. During the years that the National Socialist regime lasted, he continued his research and published more than a hundred articles in specialized magazines.
To this must be added that in 1942 he demanded that the Nazi government change his status as a Mischling –crusader–, since he was the son of a Jewish father and a Protestant mother, for one of equality with the Aryans, which he ended up achieving in the end.
For the Nazis he was not a model citizen either. It is said that when a Nazi official demanded that he sign a “declaration of Aryan race” he returned the blank form and politely pointed to the exit.
In Warburg’s defense it must be stressed that he did not conduct any immoral experiments and did not use concentration camp prisoners as experimental animals. In any case, his figure was losing ground as he gained scientific confidence and Germany lost the war.