He was born at Budapest in 1893 into medical family. Albert was a mediocre pupil at first, but at sixteen he began to read widely and decided to follow his uncle, the physiologic Mihaly Lenhossek, into medical research.
Albert Szent-Györgyi enrolled in the university in Budapest in 1911 to study medicine, but his education was interrupted by the outbreak of World War I.
He return to the university in 1917 and later received his medical degree in the same year.
He stay at Groningen from 1922 to 1926 in order to carry out research into biochemistry. His interests had settled on the chemical reactions, then a matter of wide debate amongst the world’s biochemists, by which energy is generated in the cell. Here he began investigations into the mechanism of oxidation in animal tissues which had a lasting influence on the subject.
In 1926 he came to the University of Cambridge for a PhD degree and in Cambridge he completed the isolation of substance from the adrenal glands and from oranges and cabbages. He supposed the substance to be a sugar, and in his publication on the subject proposed the name ignose, in accordance with the nomenclature for sugars.
Before came to Cambridge he had found that the adrenal cortex contains a chemical factor that bleaches a brown solution of iodine, reducing the iodine to iodide.
He received the Nobel prize for physiology in 1937. He lived in USA from 1947 on as a laboratory scientist at the Marine Biology Institute in Wood Hole.
Biography of Albert Szent-Györgyi (1893-1986)
