In 1931 German physician, physiologist and biochemist Otto Heinrich Warburg won the Nobel Prize for his discovery that cancerous cells—unlike most healthy human cells, which produce energy using oxygen via respiration—favor the anaerobic process of fermentation, or the conversion of sugar into acids, gases or alcohol, even in the presence of oxygen. This has perplexed scientists ever since because fermentation is a far less efficient means of generating energy than aerobic metabolism, hence its pejorative tag as a “wasteful metabolism.”
