Background
Szent-Györgyi was born in Budapest, Kingdom of Hungary, Austro-Hungarian Empire, in 1893. His father, Miklós Szent-Györgyi, was a landowner. His mother, Jozefina, a Roman Catholic, was a daughter of József Lenhossék and Anna Bossányi.
(A Nobel Prize winner, Dr. Szent-Györgyi concerns himself ...)
A Nobel Prize winner, Dr. Szent-Györgyi concerns himself with the underlying forces and conditions that have prevented the realization of the higher possibilities of the American Dream, and, by extension, of all mankind. He addresses himself especially to the youth of the world in his attempt to show how man, the more he progresses technologically, seems the more to regress psychologically and socially, until he resembles his primate ancestors in a state of high schizophrenia. The fundamental question asked by this book is: Why is it that most of the scientific research that is done to elevate human life serves in the end to destroy it? That this phenomenon exists is unarguable. How to alter it is the problem the author tackles. He finds the possibility, indeed the instrument of our survival, in our youth. Dr. Szent-Györgyi calls upon youth the world over to organize and exercise their power to create a new world. He implores them not to waste their energies in petulance and frustration?the world is ripe for the radical changes needed for mans survival, and for youth to fritter away their opportunity would be to compound the tragedy and seal the fate of mankind. Born into the fourth generation of a noted family of scientists in Hungary, Albert Szent-Györgyi decided at an early age to devote his life to biological research. As a medical student he required international recognition for his studies in microscopic anatomy. The First World War, which he spent in the service of the Austro-Hungarian army, caused a break in his career. After the war he left his devastated country to work for ten years in various countries, notably Germany, Holland, England and the United States. He then returned to his native Hungary to help rebuild science there. In 1937, he won the Nobel Prize for his studies on metabolism and for the discovery of ascorbic acid (Vitamin C). He soon found himself in conflict with the growing movement of Nazism, was arrested, escaped, and was hunted for years by the secret service of Hitler. After World War II, disappointed by Soviet colonialism and the terrorist methods of Stalin, he left Hungary and found refuge at the Marine Biological Laboratory of Woods Hole, Massachusetts.
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Szent-Györgyi was born in Budapest, Kingdom of Hungary, Austro-Hungarian Empire, in 1893. His father, Miklós Szent-Györgyi, was a landowner. His mother, Jozefina, a Roman Catholic, was a daughter of József Lenhossék and Anna Bossányi.
He received his M. D. degree from the University of Budapest in 1917.
In 1919, after military service in World War I, he went to the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, where he studied oxidation within living organisms and was the first to recognize the key role of several acids in the process of cellular respiration. Szent-Gyorgyi also detected in plant tissues a reducing agent that retarded oxidations. Working at Cambridge University in England beginning in 1922, he was able to obtain pure crystals of this compound. In 1927 Cambridge University awarded him the Ph. D. degree in chemistry. Returning to Hungary as a professor at the University of Szeged in 1931, Szent-Gyorgyi soon found that his crystalline reducing agent was vitamin C (ascorbic acid). In 1937 he received the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for his work on vitamin C and other aspects of biological oxidation. In studies of muscle tissue, Szent-Gyorgyi discovered a protein, actin, which when associated with another protein, myosin, formed a complex (actomyosin) that simulated the contractile threads of muscle. This opened an immense field of research in the biochemistry of muscle contraction. In 1947 Szent-Gyorgyi left Hungary for the United States, where he joined the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, Massachussets, as research director of the Institute of Muscle Research. In 1975 he became the scientific director of the National Foundation for Cancer Research. He died at Woods Hole on October 22, 1986.
He was a Hungarian biochemist who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1937. He is credited with discovering vitamin C and the components and reactions of the citric acid cycle. He was also active in the Hungarian Resistance during World War II and entered Hungarian politics after the war. Szent-Gyorgyi was the author of numerous scientific works, including Chemistry of Muscular Contraction (1947), Bioenergetics (1957), and Submolecular Biology (1960). In 1970 he wrote The Crazy Ape, which expresses his concern for the destiny of mankind in the age of modern science.
(A Nobel Prize winner, Dr. Szent-Györgyi concerns himself ...)
As the government of Gyula Gömbös and the associated Hungarian National Defence Association gained control of politics in Hungary, Szent-Györgyi helped his Jewish friends escape from the country. During World War II, he joined the Hungarian resistance movement.
Quotations:
"Water, the Hub of Life. Water is its mater and matrix, mother and medium. Water is the most extraordinary substance! Practically all its properties are anomolous, which enabled life to use it as building material for its machinery. Life is water dancing to the tune of solids. "
"Research is to see what everybody else has seen, and to think what nobody else has thought. "
"In every culture and in every medical tradition before ours, healing was accomplished by moving energy. "
"Here we stand in the middle of this new world with our primitive brain, attuned to the simple cave life, with terrific forces at our disposal, which we are clever enough to release, but whose consequences we cannot comprehend. "
He became a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1956. He was elected a member of Parliament and helped re-establish the Academy of Sciences.
He married Cornelia Demény, daughter of the Hungarian Postmaster-General, in 1917. Their daughter, Cornelia Szent-Györgyi, was born in 1918. He and Cornelia divorced in 1941. In 1941, he wed Marta Borbiro Miskolczy. She died of cancer in 1963.
Szent-Györgyi married June Susan Wichterman, the 25-year-old daughter of Woods Hole biologist Ralph Wichterman, in 1965. They were divorced in 1968.
He married his fourth wife, Marcia Houston, in 1975. They adopted a daughter, Lola von Szent-Györgyi.
