Looking Back

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PERSPECTIVES IN BIOLOGY AND MEDICINE Volume IS · Number 1 · Autumn 1971 LOOKING BACK ALBERT SZENTGYÖRGYI, M.D., PhX)* Looking back from the end of one's life, one finds its single factors emerge with greater clarity. One of them which has filled my whole scientific life with agony has been writing project proposals. It seems logical that if one asks money from anyone with which to do research, one has to tell what, one wants to do with it. However, the situation is not this simple because research means going out into the unknown with the hope of finding something new to bring home. If you know in advance what you are going to do, or even to find there, then it is not research at all: then it is only a kind of honorable occupation. But this is exactly what such proposals are: an account of what one is going to do and expects to find. Undoubtedly, there are many ways to do research and mine is certainly not the best or only one; but when I go home in the late afternoon from my laboratory I usually do not know what I am going to do the next day. That depends on what I found today, and I need time to digest it, which I mostly do overnight. All the same, all my life I have had to write project proposals, and tell what I was going to do during the next years and why. It has always been an agony to fill up five or ten pages with words. I was not always equally successful in doing so. My last two applications to the American Cancer Society were rejected offhand because I did not tell exactly enough what I planned to do. My research usually rests on triple basis: I think much, work much, and in doing so I use all my senses. When I have made any new observations they were all due to my noticing some small detail over- * Institute for Muscle Research, Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, Massachusetts . Perspectives in Biology and Medicine · Autumn 1971 | 1 looked by others. For example: the discovery of ascorbic acid was due to the observation of a small delay in the reaction of peroxidase with benzidine, a reaction done thousands of times daily. It is done even in elementary courses of biochemistry. The discovery of actin and actomyosin rested on the observation that after storage the stickiness of my muscle extracts increased. When I showed this to H. H. Weber, the leader of muscle research, he said that he has seen this many times but thought that his preparation went wrong and sent it down the sink. That I did not do likewise may have been due to the many wild theories I made which prepared my mind. A discovery is said to be an accident meeting a prepared mind. My present research has been stagnant for ten years. I think I have found its solution lately, having noticed an apparently insignificant flatness at one point of my spectroscopic curves. All these observations were unforeseen. I always try to speak the truth, but all my life have had to fill up page after page of my project proposals with untruths. There was no way out. The only alternative would have been to give up research. I am not the only one who has worked this way. I think it was Claude Bernard who compared research to hunting: one wanders more or less aimlessly till here and there game flies up or one picks up a scent. Writing papers or books was also agonizing. The light style of some of my writings is misleading. George WaId hit it right when he once said: "This paper of yours is so lightly written that you must have sweated terribly." It was not always so. When I was younger I wrote more easily. Now it is hard work and I cannot decide whether my mind got weaker or my self-criticism stronger, or both. Now I have to rewrite anything I write five times or more. I am not the only one who must do so. The researcher who wrote the...

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