How Did a Gay Scientist of Jewish Descent Thrive Under the Nazis?
Otto Warburg was a “a true Faust,” Sam Apple writes in his biography of the Nobel Prize-winning scientist, someone so “ravenous for knowledge and power” that he would do anything, including sell his soul to the devil, to achieve “full mastery over life.”Credit.Jung/ullstein bild, via Getty Images
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By Seth Mnookin
RAVENOUS
By Sam Apple
At the start of the 20th century, the German Empire was the undisputed hub of the scientific universe. From 1901, when the Nobel Prizes were established, through 1932, Germans won almost a third of all the Nobels awarded to scientists 31 in total. (American scientists, in contrast, won five during the same time period.) This impressive track record was fueled, in part, by Jewish researchers who just decades earlier would have been excluded from prominent academic positions. When the Nazis seized power in March 1933, it was not unusual for major scientific i
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