118th Albert Szent-Gyorgyi’s Birthday Doodle

Google doodle today on September 16, 2011 is dedicated to Albert von Szent-Györgyi de Nagyrápolt who born on September 16, 1893. He was a Hungarian physiologist 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.

Albert von Szent-Györgyi was born in Budapest on September 16, 1893, the son of Nicolaus von Szent-Györgyi, a great landed proprietor and Josefine, whose father, Joseph Lenhossék, and brother Michael were both Professors of Anatomy in the University of Budapest. He matriculated in 1911 and entered his uncle’s laboratory where he studied until the outbreak of World War I when he was mobilized. He served on the Italian and Russian fronts, gaining the Silver Medal for Valour, and he was discharged in 1917 after being wounded in action. He completed his studies in Budapest and then worked successively with the pharmacologist, G. Mansfeld at Pozsony, with Armin von Tschermak at Prague, where he studied electrophysiology, and with L. Michaelis in Berlin, before he went to Hamburg for a two-year course in physical chemistry at the Institute for Tropical Hygiene.

In 1920 he became an assistant at the University Institute of Pharmocology in Leiden and from 1922 to 1926 he worked with H. J. Hamburger at the Physiology Institute, Groningen, The Netherlands. In 1927 he went to Cambridge as a Rockefeller Fellow, working under F. G. Hopkins, and spent one year at the Mayo Foundation, Rochester, Minnesota, before returning to Cambridge. In 1930 he obtained the Chair of Medical Chemistry at the University of Szeged and in 1935 he also took the Chair in Organic Chemistry. At the end of World War II, he took the Chair of Medical Chemistry at Budapest and in 1947 he left Hungary to settle in the United States where he is Director of Research, Institute of Muscle Research, Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

Its nice they remember his birthday.