DR. ALBERT SZENT-GYORGYI, 93; WON NOBEL FOR VITAMIN C DISCOVERY
Author: By Alex Rothenberg, Contributing Reporter
Date: Friday, October 24, 1986
Page: 81
Section: OBITUARY
WOODS HOLE -- Graveside services will be held at 1 p.m. Friday, Oct. 24,
in the Woods Hole Church of the Messiah Cemetery for Dr. Albert I. Szent-
Gyorgyi, an early biochemistry pioneer who won the 1937 Nobel Prize for
identifying Vitamin C.
Dr. Szent-Gyorgyi, 93, died Wednesday at his home.
Born in Budapest to a family of landowners, Dr. Szent-Gyorgyi became bored
with his studies after he entered the University of Budapest in 1911 as a
medical student. After joining the Austro-Hungarian army in World War I and
fighting on the Russian and Italian fronts, where he was wounded, he resumed
his studies and received his medical degree in 1917.
When Communists took over the Hungarian government after the war, he left
Hungary and traveled about Europe for 12 years, teaching in Germany, Holland,
England (where he received a doctorate of philosophy from Cambridge
University) and the United States.
In 1932 Dr. Szent-Gyorgyi was invited by the government that overthrew the
Communists to return to Hungary to work as a professor of medical chemistry
and later a professor of organic chemistry at Szeged.
While studying the mechanics of biological oxidation, he first isolated
Vitamin C. In 1937 he received the Nobel Prize in physiology and chemistry for
this discovery and also for his research on the catalytic function of C-
dicarboxylic acids, also known as the Krebs Cycle.
The Krebs Cycle, which he discovered with scientist Sir Hans Krebs, is a
sequence of chemical reactions by which living organisms store energy in
muscles by oxidizing acetic acid or a chemical equivalent.
He later won the Lasker Award from the American Heart Association for his
work studying the heart.
After the Nazis swept into Hungary, Dr. Szent-Gyorgyi joined the resistance
movement there and as a cover, he studied the workings of muscles and why they
contract.
Adolph Hitler ordered him captured and killed when he became aware Dr.
Szent-Gyorgyi was delivering important scientific and political papers to the
British legation.
After the war he immigrated to the United States and in 1947 set up shop at
the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, where he researched muscle
chemistry and later studied cancer. His cancer research led him to a
radical hypothesis in the early 1960s that two substances control cell growth,
based on his research in mice. He said that the substance retine slowed tumor
growth while another, promine, hastens it.
Dr. Szent-Gyorgyi also worked on muscle chemistry, problems relating to how
the body produces and utilizes energy, and the chemistry of the thymus gland.
His research on the human body inspired his beliefs about mankind and the
future of the human race. Angered by the US presence in southeast Asia, in
1966 he joined with other prominent persons in refusing to pay his income
taxes to protest US military forces in Vietnam and the Dominican Republic.
He often brought attention to serious problems by making unusual statements
about them. In 1966 he warned of impending cannibalism unless the world
population was controlled. His solution was for the US government to
disseminate birth control information to the world.
He considered bomb shelters "senseless" if a nuclear war broke out and said
of nuclear weapons that there were unfavorable "statistical chances that
someone will fire one, or one will go off by mistake." He described ''enormous
vested interest in armaments and none in peace . . . an atomic war would
forever damage the genetic material which carries the future of the human race
. . . even prolonged testing would do so."
In 1970, Dr. Szent-Gyorgyi complained, "We find out how nerves work and
they make nerve gas; we find out how things grow and they make herbicides."
During the 1970s his work concentrated on a theory that free electrons are
a key in both the normal and abnormal behavior of human body cells. Such
ideas, considered radical, often got his private and federal research funds
cut off because he could not predict where his work would lead him.
"When everyone begins to laugh at you, then you know you are two steps
ahead," he said in an interview.
Dr. Szent-Gyorgyi leaves his wife, Marsha (Houston); a daughter, Lola of
Boston; three grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
ROTHEN;10/22 NIGRO ;10/24,12:56 SZENT24
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