Albert Szent-Györgyi

Albert Szent-Györgyi was born on September 16, 1893, in Budapest, Austria-Hungary. After serving as an army medic during World War I—intentionally wounding his own arm to escape the brutal trenches—he pursued rigorous doctoral studies in biochemistry across Prague, Berlin, Leiden, and Cambridge University under Frederick Gowland Hopkins.

In the late 1920s while studying adrenal tissue, Szent-Györgyi isolated an unknown reducing organic compound he named 'hexuronic acid.' Moving to the University of Szeged in Hungary in 1930, he discovered that native Szeged paprika peppers contained staggering concentrations of the compound. Conducting feeding trials with scorbutic guinea pigs, he proved that hexuronic acid was the long-sought antiscorbutic factor, renaming it **ascorbic acid (Vitamin C)**. For this monumental discovery and his research on cellular respiration and fumaric acid catalysis, he was awarded the 1937 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

During World War II, Szent-Györgyi joined the Hungarian anti-fascist underground resistance, secretly traveling to Istanbul to negotiate an armistice with British intelligence, which led Adolf Hitler to issue a personal warrant for his arrest. Emigrating to the United States in 1947, he founded the Institute for Muscle Research at Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory, where he discovered the contractile muscle proteins **actin and myosin**. He passed away in Woods Hole on October 22, 1986.