Szent-Györgyi and Nobel

Not every great Hungarian achievement is an invention. Albert Szent-Györgyi's isolation of vitamin C is a discovery, and the best known of a group of science Nobel Prizes connected with Hungary. This chapter describes his work, the role of paprika in it, and the other laureates, and it asks how a country counts "its" Nobel winners. Names, dates and details are from general knowledge and flagged for checking. Nothing here is medical advice.

Albert Szent-Györgyi

He was born in Budapest in 1893 into an educated family (check the family details) and studied medicine there, with service in the First World War (check). He then worked in several European laboratories, including Cambridge under Frederick Gowland Hopkins, before returning to Hungary in the early 1930s as professor at the University of Szeged (check the dates and posts).

Vitamin C and Paprika

Scurvy, a disease of sailors and others deprived of fresh food, had long been known to be prevented by certain fruits and vegetables. The active substance had not been isolated. Szent-Györgyi had earlier extracted a sugar-like acid from the adrenal glands and other sources, which he called hexuronic acid (check the details). He came to believe it was the anti-scurvy factor but lacked enough of it to prove it.

• The paprika. At Szeged, in the Hungarian paprika-growing region, he found that paprika peppers were an unusually rich source (check the story, which is often told with an anecdote of a dinner table). Large amounts could be extracted cheaply.
• The proof. With his collaborators, including the American biochemist Joseph Svirbely (check the name and role), he showed that the substance cured scurvy in guinea pigs (check).
• The name. It was renamed ascorbic acid, "anti-scurvy acid" (check the credit for the name, and the chemical structure work of Norman Haworth, who shared a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1937).

This is a discovery in the sense of Chapter 1: finding something that existed, with a practical outcome in nutrition and in the later manufacture of the vitamin (check).

The 1937 Prize and After

Szent-Györgyi won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1937 for work on biological oxidation with special reference to vitamin C and the catalysis of fumaric acid (check the wording). He went on to research muscle contraction, where he and his team studied the proteins actin and myosin (check). After the Second World War he left Hungary in 1947 for the United States, where he worked at Woods Hole in Massachusetts and later on cancer research (check the dates and the circumstances), and died in 1986 (check).

Other Hungarian-Born Nobel Laureates

A selection of scientists and others connected with Hungary who won Nobel Prizes (check each, since the list depends on the definition of "Hungarian"):

Imre Kertész's Nobel Prize in Literature in 2002 is outside the science list (see Hungarian Literature). Several of the others did their prize work abroad (see Chapter 8).

Who Counts as Hungarian?

Lists of Hungarian Nobel winners vary in length, depending on whether they include people born in the old Kingdom of Hungary but in territories now elsewhere, people of Hungarian descent born abroad, and emigres who took other citizenships (check how various sources count). This is a sensitive question of identity and borders. The course notes the problem and does not take a side: it uses "Hungarian-born" or "connected with Hungary" as a working description, and reports where people did their work.

Exercises