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The interview
LH: What is the fundamental concept of your therapy?
JB: I was senior expert for pharmaceuticals and fats in the Federal Health Office; this was the highest authority in our country responsible for deciding on approvals for medication. At this time, 1951, many applications had been submitted to me for approval, or to be more precise, these were medications for cancer therapy with the sulfhydryl group (sulfur-containing protein compounds). Everywhere I saw that fats played a role, also in expert reports provided by well-known professors like Prof. Nonnenbruch.
Unfortunately, we could only detect fats in the late stage, and there were no chemical values to detect fats chemically at all. By this time, 1951, I had already developed the first chemical verifications for fat, jointly with Professor Kaufmann, the director of the German Federal Institute for Research on Grain, Potatoes and Fat, and my former doctoral advisor, who was also director of the Pharmaceutical Institute. This was published in 1950 in Neue Wege in der Fettforschung (New Directions in Fat Research).
Using the method of paper chromatography, which I had developed, I could analyze 0.1 mg of fat, and characterize it as highly unsaturated or unsaturated. We then published this extensively.
These were the first studies that made it even possible to detect linoleic acid or linolenic acid. Due to the importance of this work, 16 doctoral candidates were assigned to support my efforts. In this situation I noticed the sulfhydryl groups in my appraisal of the medications for cancer therapy. Through official channels I had the right to ask the companies questions relative to how they wanted to substantiate how this substance (sulfhydryl group) could help with cancer. The companies e.g. the company Knoll, which wanted to use these types of medications as cancer therapy were prepared to send all the copies of the created file, on my request.
Consequently, in early 1951, I got a very fast overview of where the problems were in this issue. That was the same year that B. Flaschenträger’s manual appeared: Physiologische Chemie (Physiological Chemistry). The problem of automatic oxygen absorption for the living substrate is one of the most elementary questions in all of physiology, and it is one of the darkest. Everybody knows the sulfur-containing protein compound of the sulfhydryl group can be detected in all breathing tissues.
However another partner must be present in the interplay with this sulfhydryl group, because the self-active oxygen consumption in the living system is executed in a zig zag curve. Strictly speaking, it is manifest that oxygen consumption does not produce a reaction product; rather it occurs in an interplay between the positive electrically-charged sulphur compounds in the protein, and some kind of fatty substance that we cannot detect, because no verifications for it are available. This fatty substance however plays a major role in the Warburg’s respiratory enzyme.
Warburg recognized that with the Warburg respiratory enzyme or the cytochrome oxydase, fats play a role in the lack of oxygen consumption and oxygen utilization (utilization in the living substrate). He wanted to overcome this blockade in the experiment with butyric acid. This attempt was a failure.
LH: Does this mean that Warburg was the first who attempted to introduce more oxygen into the cell with butyric acid?
JB: No, von Helmholz, the man who discovered ozone, had attempted to get more oxygen into the cell. He showed that when we treat doves who have become asphyctic (i.e. doves that have been fed in such a manner that oxygen absorption is blocked), with increased ozone or oxygen, they then die more quickly – and this is still the case today. If the “oxygen bomb” is set up in the hospital for a person with oxygen deficiency, then the sick person dies more quickly.
If animals can be made asphyctic through a certain diet, e.g. bleached rice, then they suffocate and neither increased introduction of oxygen nor activation with any other possible substance will help. At this time we already knew vitamin A, B, C, D, and E, but this did not help. Prof. Linus Pauling for example had been involved with animal experiments and knew precisely that it had been published in 1951 that all vitamins had been investigated in searching for the respiratory activator for Warburg’s respiratory enzyme, but this had produced absolutely nothing, not even vitamin C. By the way Professor Pauling, who had requested all my books from me personally, and who also received them from me, never referred to my work later.
And then the idea occurred to Warburg in 1926 that fats play a role. However he did not know which ones, and experimented with butyric acid. By the way, [Albert] Svent György also experimented with fats and wrote as early as 1952 that the substances are too easily oxidized and we cannot detect them. In this situation I then published my new ways of fat analysis, namely to introduce sensitive and specific verifications, nice stains. I was able to analyze fats precisely and break them down into the individual fatty acid components.
LH: What effects do these fatty acids have?
JB: They form the opposite electrical pole to the positively charged protein in the cell nucleus. They are located in the cell membrane and have been known for a long time as lipoids (fatty substances). In the case of tumor ........
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