Hitler personally ordered the liquidation of Szent-Györgyi Albert after undertaking the secret mission

In his maternal lineage, Lenhossék-orvosdinasztiából, he was born in Budapest on September 16, 1893. He was not a good student at school and had to take a private tutor, but he was preparing to be a scientist by the age of nineteen. When World War I broke out, he was called up as a medic to the front, received a silver military decoration, but considered the war meaningless and was wounded and discharged due to his injuries. In 1917, he graduated, and then pursued studies in biology, physiology, pharmacology, bacteriology, and physical chemistry in Presov, Prague, Berlin, Leiden, and Groningen, and later obtained his second doctorate in chemistry at Cambridge. His first studies concerned the mechanisms of cellular respiration, and he demonstrated the oxidation-reduction electron transfer process through experiments. In 1930, at the invitation of Kuno Klebelsberg, he returned home with his family and took over the leadership of the biochemical department he had established for himself at Szeged, moving it from Kolozsvár to Szeged after Trianon, and became rector in 1940. His students admired the young, good-looking professor: they did not rely on his authority but trusted him, went on excursions with him, traveled through Europe with him by motorcar, played tennis, flew in a winning airplane, and learned to swim at the age of seventeen. While at Cambridge, while studying cell respiration, he noticed that a particular oxidation process was slower than expected for some reason, which pointed to the presence of a reducing substance. He succeeded in extracting the reducing substance from the mellves (liver) as well as the potato and the orange, and since they ignored (potassium-sugar), and since the substance was hypothesized to have seven carbon atoms, he called it hexuronic acid, which was more acceptable to his colleagues. He managed to produce 25 grams from several liver samples, but the small amount did not allow for in-depth investigation. In 1931, he began to examine paprika in Szeged—legend has it that his wife did not like to eat the paprika given for dinner, but rather took it for examination in the laboratory. To his surprise, the paprika contained a large amount of hexuronic acid and in a short time, he had more than a kilogram in his hands. He identified this with vitamin C and, due to its scurvy-preventing effect, called it ascorbic acid. Szent-Györgyi and his colleague, Joseph Svirbely, published their discovery in the journal Nature in 1932, but the American Charles Glen King had already made a similar announcement in Science two weeks earlier. After a long debate, it turned out that Szent-Györgyi had stated in the Budapest Medical Society on March 18 that hexuronic acid and vitamin C were the same substance, thus gaining priority. In recent years, the lives of great-scale scientists have been fascinatingly processed by a movie-watching eye. But why has the Hungarian film industry not yet been inspired by Szent-Györgyi Albert's life, which is quite interesting and dynamic in international relations? On the occasion of his 125th birthday, we compiled 13+1 interesting facts about the Nobel laureate. Let the game begin: what did you know so far? In 1934, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine, which was awarded to him on October 28, 1937, by the Swedish Karolinska Institute "for his discoveries in the field of biological combustion, especially vitamin C, and the catalysis of fumic acid." At the beginning of World War II, the Hungarian National Museum purchased the award from him, and he donated the sum to the Finnish victims of the Finnish-Soviet war. At the time of receiving the Nobel Prize, he was elated, knowing that his discovery did not serve killing. A few years later, he had to learn that in Nazi Germany they were starting to produce an ascorbic acid compound by which the sailors of the Mediterranean could hunt the enemy ships on the open sea for months. In 1936, he isolated the flavonols that regulate the permeability of hair strands, and the P-vitamine. Studying the oxygen uptake of muscle tissues, he investigated the conversion of tissue to tea-acid, and found that four organic dicarboxylic acids accelerated cellular respiration in a catalytic manner, which led to the discovery of citric acid. Szent-Györgyi's regular academic membership was only obtained with difficulty, despite the Nobel Prize and the Corvin collar (1937), in modern, rational Szent-Györgyi. The scientist, who spoke excellent English, undertook a secret diplomatic mission during World War II, and when the Germans learned this, Hitler personally ordered its liquidation. After Hungary's occupation by Germany, he was forced to flee, and after the taking of power, he fled to the Swedish embassy, from where, just before a German raid, he smuggled himself across into territory under Soviet control in a car trunk. After 1945, he became the second deputy of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, a founder of the Hungarian-Soviet Friendship Society, and an invited parliamentary representative outside the party (he was never a member of the party). Since he saw that the communists' growing power endangered the values and personal freedom they represented, in 1947, he traveled to the United States for freedom. His name also appeared for the first time on the list of Kossuth Prize recipients in 1948. He settled in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and in the Laboratory of Muscle Research, which he established for the Oceanographic Institute, he worked on cellular respiration, biochemistry, biogenetics, and cancer research. He maintained his connections with his homeland throughout, became the honorary doctor of the University of Szeged in 1973, and in 1978 was a member of the American delegation that brought the Szent Korona home. The Nobel laureate died on October 22, 1986, at the age of 93. One year later, the University of Szeged took the name Szent-Györgyi Albert, which is today carried by the Faculty of Medicine of Szeged. On the staircase of the rector's office, there is a plaque commemorating him with a paprika wreath every year. The permanent exhibition in the city shows his legacy, personal belongings, tools, and a copy of the Nobel Prize, and the Hungarian Institute of Medical Biology purchased his former Szeged house last year.