Abstract
In his classic report, "Metabolism of Tumors" in 1925, Warburg postulated several generalizations concerning malignant tumor tissue metabolism, and summarized from his studies that "interference with the respiration in growing cells is, from the standpoint of the physiology of metabolism, the cause of tumors. If the respiration of a growing cell is disturbed, as a rule the cell dies. If it does not die, a tumor cell results."(1) Although the Respiratory interference as the cause of tumors is no longer held as the primary cause (2,3,4), generalized metabolic characteristics of 1) low oxygen uptake rates, 2) high aerobic glycolysis, and 3) high anaerobic glycolysis reported by Warburg have been found by later workers (5,6,7,8) to be descriptive of all malignant tumor tissue enabling a classification of what is or is not cancer tissue by metabolic measurements on tissue slices.