On Wednesday, September 15, 2021 at 7:44:42 AM UTC-4 Edward K. Ream wrote: > Namely the Nobelist Albert Szent-Györgyi. > <https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/1937/szent-gyorgyi/biographical/> >
The National Library of Medicine of the National Institutes of Health has a section of its Web site devoted to him <https://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/spotlight/wg>. While I did not know Albert adult-to-adult, I grew up well aware of his work and the regard in which other scientists held him. My mother and father started their careers in basic research in his lab, and we all lived in the same town on Cape Cod, so his family and mine spent a lot of time together. His English was first-rate, an accomplishment since English and Hungarian are not related, and learning either is difficult for the person whose language is the other. I was fortunate to hear him give a lecture aimed at the generalist. Albert is worthy of note because receiving the 1937 Nobel in Physiology or Medicine did not lead him to cease conducting pioneering research. The above-linked article on the investigation of the molecular motor of muscle mentions groundbreaking work that his lab did in isolation during World War II. That work continued after the war, and moved with him to the United States. The loss of a wife and daughter to cancer led him to shift his focus to that disease when he was in his late seventies; he continued that work until shortly before his death at 93. His birth and upbringing in Habsburg Hungary, a country that had yet to leave behind prescientific structures and roots, along with his interest in basic research spurred in him an interest the lag in society's progression from a prescientific to a scientific basis. That, combined with his experience as a public figure during a turbulent period in Hungary, meant that he was privately and publicly involved in political matters. The enmity of the German Nazis and their Hungarian allies drove him into hiding. Later on, risk to his life earned through his opposition to the coming Communist order in Hungary led him to move to the United States. There, he continued to involve himself in politics - he was one of the eminent scientists who contacted the Kennedy Administration to educate it on the nature of nuclear weapons and the threat that they posed. When he reached seventy, when most retire, he wrote an essay that drew on all that, "Lost in the Twentieth Century" <https://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/spotlight/wg/catalog/nlm:nlmuid-101584924X128-doc>, which opens the 1963 *Annals of Biochemistry*. In 1971, in his late seventies, he wrote another essay, "Looking Back" <https://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/spotlight/wg/catalog/nlm:nlmuid-101584924X156-doc>, which is primarily about science but places it in context of life and conditions in the US. Anyone who share's Edward's broad perspective on science, technology, and society should look them up. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "leo-editor" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to leo-editor+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/leo-editor/2b207bd1-fb9f-41ac-a979-d253bd7fdf74n%40googlegroups.com.
