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( Albert Szent-Györgyi)
Albert Szent-Györgyi de Nagyrápolt (September 16, 1893 – October 22, 1986) was a Hungarian physiologist who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1937. He is credited with detecting vitamin C. He was also active in the Hungarian Resistance during World War II and entered Hungarian politics after the war. Szent-Györgyi was born in Budapest, Austria-Hungary. His father, Miklós Szent-Györgyi, was a landowner. His mother, Jozefin, was a daughter of József Lenhossék and a sister of Mihály Lenhossék; both of these men were Professors of Anatomy at the University of Budapest. Szent-Györgyi began his studies at the Budapest Medical School, but soon became bored with classes and began research in his uncle's anatomy lab. His studies were interrupted in 1914 to serve as an army medic in World War I. In 1916, disgusted with the war, Szent-Györgyi shot himself in the arm, claimed to be wounded from enemy fire, and was sent home on medical leave. He was then able to finish his medical education and receive his MD in 1917. He married Kornélia Demény, the daughter of the Hungarian Postmaster General that same year. She accompanied him to his next position at an army clinic in northern Italy. After the war, Szent-Györgyi began his research career in Pressburg (Hungarian Pozsony, today Bratislava). When the city became part of Czechoslovakia in January 1919, he left the town as did a portion of the Hungarian population. He switched universities several times over the next few years, finally ending up at the University of Groningen, where his work focused on the chemistry of cellular respiration. This work landed him a position as a Rockefeller Foundation fellow at Cambridge University. He received his PhD from Cambridge in 1927 for his work on isolating what he then called "hexuronic acid" from adrenal gland tissue. He accepted a position at the University of Szeged in 1931. There, Szent-Györgyi and his research fellow Joseph Svirbely found that "hexuronic acid" was actually vitamin C (the L-enantiomer of ascorbic acid) and noted its anti-scorbutic activity. In some experiments they used paprika as the source for their vitamin C. Also during this time, Szent-Györgyi continued his work on cellular respiration, identifying fumaric acid and other steps in what would become known as the Krebs cycle.
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