Continuing War

The largest lecture room at the University of Illinois College of Medicine in Chicago was jammed one day last week. Every one of the 325 seats was taken; 150 people stood in the aisles. Word had gone around that Dr. Otto Warburg, 65, respectfully called "the Old Man," was going to make his first public report since he arrived from Germany last June.

A Nobel Prizewinner (1931), Warburg is a biochemist about whom anecdotes crystallize. In the '305 the Nazis had winked at the fact that he was "non-Aryan," allowed him to keep on working in the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. Warburg's field was cancer research, and Hitler had a personal dread of the disease. Warburg could also manage the occupation authorities. When Berlin was first occupied, he lost his riding horses twice, once to the Russians and once to the Americans; he got them back each time.

Fellow biochemists were sure he would have some news last week. He did. He has been working with enzymes, the chemical substances found in the body and in plants, that act like catalysts (e.g., pepsin in the stomach). Previously, he had isolated eight of eleven enzymes that cause fermentation, then devoted his time to studying just one of them, an enzyme he called zymohexase. He found that the blood of rats with cancer contains more zymohexase than that of normal rats, and that the larger the tumor, the greater the amount of the enzyme.

Since cancer cells ferment as they grow, Warburg had suggested finding a substance that would stop the fermentation. Now, he announced that he had found an "anti-zymohexase," and that enough zymohexase can be drawn from the body to make large quantities of the anti-enzyme.

Had cancer fighters gained another inch or so in their Sisyphean progress? Much work remained to be done before anyone could be sure. Said Warburg, after discussing the action of the anti-enzyme: "It must now be found out by experiment whether such an anti-enzyme will inhibit the growth of tumors in the human body."

Research into cancer leads workers into many byways, occasionally into danger. In September, Biochemist Herbert Winegard began to study a substance called ergo-thioneine, a sulphur compound found in abnormal amounts in the urine of cancer patients; it may, chemists think, affect the growth of cancer. In order to make the compound artificially, Winegard had to work with an unstable chemical compound called diazomethane; it is a deadly, odorless yellow gas that can be inhaled without giving a warning sensation of choking. No antidote is known. On Thanksgiving Day he finished his first pilot synthesis at Philadelphia's Lankenau Hospital Cancer Research Institute, did it again a week later.

One day last week, at 28, Winegard died in Philadelphia's Jewish Hospital. It was just four years to the day since he had turned down a higher-paid commercial job to work at Lankenau--to satisfy "a longstanding ambition." Diazomethane, it appeared, had damaged his lungs and made him an easy prey for pneumonia.

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