Professor Otto Warburg

Not to be confused with Otto Heinrich Warburg, a distant cousin, Nobel Prize Laureate, namesake of the Warburg effect.

Otto Warburg (1859-1938), was a botanist and industrial agriculture expert and an active member of the World Zionist Organization, which worked toward the re-establishment of Israel. He later served as the WZO's president from 1911-21.

Otto Warburg was born in Hamburg on 20 July 1859 to a family whose ancestors came to Germany in 1566, possibly from Bologna.

He completed his studies at the Johanneum Gymnasium in Hamburg in 1879, and continued his education in the field of botany at the University of Bonn which he left after one semester to move to the University of Berlin, and later to University of Strasbourg, where he received his Ph.D in 1883. He went on to study chemistry in Munich and physiology in Tübingen with Wilhelm Pfeffer.

In 1885 he embarked on a 4 year expedition to Southern and Souteastern Asia, ending in Australia in 1889. His findings were later (1913-1922) published in three volumes titled “Die Pflanzenwelt”. Upon his return to Berlin he co founded "Der Tropen Pflanzer", a journal specializing in tropical agriculture which he edited for 24 years.

Realizing that as a Jew he would not be appointed full professor, he diverted his attentions to applied botanics, and founded several companies of tropical industrial plantations in Germany's colonies.

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