POWER GAMES

摘要

There's a fight going on inside all our cells for each breath of air. Nick Lane sheds therapeutic light on the implications for cancer and degenerative diseases. Seventy-five years ago, Otto Warburg's star was at its zenith. The pioneering German biochemist delivered his Nobel address in December 1931. He described the ingenious experiments by which he had unmasked the enzyme responsible for the critical step of cell respiration, the process that turns the energy in chemical compounds into energy thecell can use. His work on respiration in the early 1930s nearly earned him a second Nobel, ultimately denied him by Hitler. Then his star began sinking. His ideas on the importance of cell respiration in cancer led many to dismiss him as a crank. And the rise of molecular genetics in the 1960s put such ideas into a far distant orbit.