Warburg was born in
Copenhagen. Her father Erik was a notable cardiologist and her mother's name was Louise Valentiner. During
World War II, the family remained in Copenhagen and Warburg joined the
resistance movement at the age of 15. Her tasks were to code and decide telegrams from London about weapons and parachute drops. In 1944, she became a student at
Ingrid Jespersens Gymnasieskole. She then studied medicine at the
University of Copenhagen, graduating in 1952. Starting in 1961, she began to study a Danish family with a high number of cases of a
hereditary degenerative disease, and eventually identified and described the disease. She named it
Norrie disease after noted Danish ophthalmologist
Gordon Norrie. Her dissertation describing the disease was awarded the Doyne Memorial Medal in Oxford in 1979. In 1963, she was appointed associate professor of
ophthalmology at
Aarhus University. In 1974 she was appointed chief physician at the children’s hospital in
Vangede, a position she held until 1996. She also worked extensively at the Institute for the Blind and the Danish Mental Health Service, where she studied visual defects and their connection to mental health. In 1971 Warburg and her research partner
Arthur Earl Walker published the symptoms of an eye disease which they named
Walker–Warburg syndrome; the syndrome is a form of
autosomal recessive congenital muscular dystrophy. She received the
Tagea Brandt Scholarship in 1980 and Synoptik Foundation's Honorary Award in 1996. == Personal life ==