ISTVAN HARGITTAI: OUR LIVES - ENCOUNTERS OF A SCIENTIST Preface | Contents | About the Author You can now buy the book through this Web site. Just click on this button to start the process of online payment: FOREWORD Honoured Reader, The book you hold in your hand requires no preface from me, for the author has written his own apologia. It is compounded of the turbulent time of his youth, and of his life's work and achievement; and through it all speak the voices of his parents, grandparents and friends. I wish merely to commend to you his story, woven around his encounters with Nobel laureates and other scientists, great and small. Its message is distilled from his life's experiences, their tumultuous historical background, and his dedication to his profession. It reflects throughout the spiritual and intellectual setting, in which Hungarian and Jewish identities are indissolubly linked. The book is deeply personal - a literary creation, and at the same time an authentic document of science history. It presents an unembellished chronicle of a family that was made to endure the privations and horrors of a haunting era in the history of our country. Whether in its multi-layered totality the message that emerges is one of sorrow and foreboding, or of optimism and resilience of the human spirit, readers will have to decide for themselves, according to their own values, hopes and fears. -- Árpád Göncz * * Mr. Göncz was President of Hungary, 1990-2000. PREFACE Suddenly the 20th century was over and much of what had happened in it had already become the history of a long time ago. For some time I have felt that I should record some of the events that I had experienced as a scientist and as a Jewish Hungarian - events that may no longer exist in the 21st century. I started doing research in 1964 with complete devotion to it. I was so absorbed in my work that I recognized the curves in my research project in the cracks of the pavement. I did not have much interest in great scientists unless they had done something specifically in my narrow field of molecular structure determination. I preferred reading journal articles to monographs because I supposed that by the time the material had become available in a book, it was no longer up-to-date. Eventually my attitude changed and, by the mid-1990s, when I founded the magazine, The Chemical Intelligencer, I had become interested in the personal aspects of science. This interest has remained although the magazine lasted for only six years. My interest in social issues, including Jewish affairs, also used to be slight. I grew up in an atmosphere of the double identity of Jews in Hungary. We remembered our deportation to a concentration camp in 1944, when I was 3 years old, as part of this identity. Otherwise, our life was one of assimilation with all of its ambiguities. That, assimilation notwithstanding, Jewish people often end up with Jewish spouses, and mostly Jewish friends, is an interesting phenomenon, implying a separation, real or perceived, whose extent varies with the changes of external circumstances. The political transformations around 1990 in Eastern Europe brought changes to the situation of Jews living there. The return of democracy and greater freedom of self-expression were accompanied by the flaring up of anti-Semitism. Their combined effect served to strengthen the feeling of Jewish identity, and I was no exception. Each chapter in this book is named after a Nobel laureate scientist, a chemist, a physicist, or a biomedical scientist, and tells something about his or her life and works. It also branches off to other personalities and in most cases to a narrative of some episodes of my own life or the lives of some of my friends. Naturally, not all the great scientists receive the Nobel Prize and selecting only Nobel laureates for my logos in this book gives the impression that I am amplifying the watershed effect that the Nobel Prize introduces among scientists. However, the Nobel Prize is the only scientific recognition that is well known broadly, hence my choice. I have had personal encounters with all of the Nobel laureates whose names serve as chapter titles and with most other scientists mentioned in the book. The aspects of my life that are described in this book do not come together as an autobiography. Rather, it is a collage whose components are largely self-contained; the book need not be read in sequence. By blending these personal stories together with my experiences with famous scientists, I aimed at showing that scientists are also human beings, that science can be and is often done in adversity, and it also gave me an opportunity to communicate some science in a gentle way. Although this book is a personal account, I believe that some of my life experience has a more general relevance. I like to think that, in a small way, it is also part of what is often referred to as the Middle European experience, which has had much to offer to world culture. I am a rather typical representative of my generation, however much we may like to think of ourselves as distinct individuals. Some of my experiences throughout my life have been extreme. However, I did not perish in an extermination camp, and, in spite of the many obstacles placed in front of me, I was able to study and succeed in my chosen profession. I like to think that most of my negative life experience will not be repeated in future generations, but to make sure it does not, we need to remember the past. In this sense, I feel that my negative experiences are more instruc-tive than the positive ones. To be sure, I have had many pleasant experi-ences in my life and my basic approach to life has been optimistic. My mother tongue is Hungarian, but I had no doubt that I should write this book in English. For my audience, I envisioned my future grandchildren who, at the time of writing these lines, do not yet exist. With our children most probably settling in the United States, they should find it convenient to read this book in their own language. While my grandchildren are an abstraction for the time being, my children are the most tangible reality, although they hardly figure in this book; my wife Magdi does not either, to any great degree. They are the greatest gift in my life and I am writing this book for them, for Magdi, Balázs, and Eszter. But it is to the memory of my mother, whose example taught me perseverance and tolerance, defiance and social solidarity, that I dedicate this book. István Hargittai Budapest, September 2002 TABLE OF CONTENTS Our Lives Encounters of a Scientist with the 20th Century Contents Foreword (Árpád Göncz) Introduction Preface Sune Bergström Prostaglandins Fatherless With Bare Hands in the Mine Field Rewinding the Film What Is in a Name? Marshall Nirenberg Darts on Target Career Roadposts Mother Uncle Life Is Beautiful Philip Anderson Solid State Moscow, 1982 Carter, Teller, and the USSR And Koestler Too To Bomb Or Not to Bomb The Kasztner Dilemma Frederick Sanger Modesty My Brother Brother's Story Trains Moving Schooling in Vienna Vienna 2002 Brother Continues Homebound Roald Hoffmann Loneliness of the Nobel Laureate Great Klein Non-Conformism and Conformism Variants for Father Herbert Hauptman X-ray Crystallography Yearning to Learn Connections Hurdles to Education "Too Good to Let Him Study" Social Categories Class Struggle Odd Hassel Looking for a Profession Start of a Research Career Hassel Lecture Homage to Teachers Nikolai Semenov Branching Chains Kapitsa and Landau Kitaigorodskii Russian Impressions Advances in Science and Elsewhere Manfred Eigen Fast Reactions Darwinian Molecules Lost Dream László Kiss Matters of Fact Excerpts from an Auschwitz Diary Gertrude Elion Tapping Resources Life-Saving Drugs Barriers Life-Saving Mathematics The Man Who Loved People Speaking for Others George Olah Past Pains Demarcation Polanyi's Testimony Icing on a Discovery Model and Modeler Leon Lederman Parity Violated Fascination and Reflection Byproduct of Quarantine Remembrance Rudolf Mössbauer Neutrinos Academia in Amnesia Murderous Silence Walls, Visible and Invisible Harold Kroto Truncated Icosahedron Originality Truncated History Chiune Sugihara Linus Pauling Resonating Ideology Versatility Customers and Victims Confronting Experiences Degrees of Immortality Bringing Salvation Bruce Merrifield Solid Phase Synthesis Control Experiment Combinatorial Approach Unlikely Career James Watson Authors and Pupils Provocative Crick Guided Budapest Impact and Style Taking Direction Eugene Wigner Life and Literature Meeting Physics Learning Symmetry Hungarian Realities Then… Rosalyn Yalow Tough Life Magdi Weighty Issues Everything Is Personal Chronologies Notes Acknowledgements Index About the Author By the Same Author ABOUT THE AUTHOR István Hargittai is Professor of Chemistry and head of the George A. Olah PhD School at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. He is member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, foreign member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, and member of the Academia Europaea (London). He holds a Ph.D. from Eötvös University of Budapest, a D.Sc. from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and honorary doctorates from Moscow State University, the University of North Carolina, and the Russian Academy of Sciences. He has lectured in over 30 countries and taught at several universities in the United States. He has publishes extensively on structural chemistry and on symmetry-related topics. His books include The Martians of Science, The Road to Stockholm, the Candid Science book series of interviews with famous scientists, and Our Lives, which contains a considerable amount of autobiographical material. He and his scientist wife live in Budapest. Their grown children live in the United States.