News

« back to home « previous news item | next news item »

Professor Gábor Tigyi spent much of his childhood and youth at the former Medical University of Pécs, and from there, he went on to make discoveries of major scientific importance. We spoke with the research professor currently working in the United States about the years that laid the foundations of his career in Pécs, his friendship with Katalin Karikó and György Buzsáki, and the unexpected paths of scientific research.

Written by Miklós Stemler

Probably only a few distinguished alumni of the former Medical University of Pécs can say that they not only spent their university years on campus but had already been a familiar presence there as children and even worked there before becoming students. In Dr. Gábor Tigyi’s case, however, this is hardly surprising given the central role his family played in the life of the institution. His father, academician Dr. József Tigyi, left a lasting mark on the university both as a researcher and as a leader, while his uncle, Dr. András Tigyi, made significant contributions to teaching and research in the field of cell biology. This extraordinary family background shaped Gábor Tigyi’s career in two important ways.

“I admired the work of my father and my uncle, so there was never any question that I would follow them into medicine,” said Gábor Tigyi in connection with his career choice. “At the same time, however, from the beginning I was ambitious enough to want to succeed on my own merits, not because I happened to be the son of a man who was a major figure in Hungarian medicine at the time. That is why I went to the Biological Research Centre in Szeged (SZBK), where I began working during my final year of medical school, and then returned to Pécs to receive my degree.

An excellent school

To be accepted to the SZBK, one of Hungary’s leading centres for biological research, the young researcher first had to distinguish himself through his performance in Pécs. To this day, Gábor Tigyi remains deeply grateful to the teachers and mentors who supported him along the way. Since the medical curriculum itself did not provide training in the most advanced methods of experimental medicine, he acquired these skills through his work in the Undergraduate Research Society (TDK) and during the months he spent at the SZBK.

“There were many people who generously gave their time to a young man and patiently explained how things should be done, regardless of whether I happened to be one of their TDK students. I owe a great amount to Professor József Szeberényi from the Department of Medical Biology, as well as to Péter Juhász and Tihamér Tomcsányi. During the summers, they gave me the freedom to pursue my own research, and István Pócsik, László Nagy and Tibor Lakatos helped me from the Department of Biophysics. There was an excellent technician there, Zoltán Futó, as well as the electrical engineer János Hegedűs, who always found a solution whenever I needed a new piece of equipment or something broke down, which, at that time, was almost impossible to replace. Pécs was an excellent school.”

After Szeged, the next stages of Gábor Tigyi’s career took him abroad. He completed his postdoctoral studies in Sweden and Germany, then he moved to the United States in 1985 due to a scholarship.

„One of the main objectives at the Biological Research Centre in Szeged was to spend time abroad, learning from internationally renowned scientists if possible. That gave me the opportunity to work with the distinguished Mexican neuroscientist Ricardo Miledi, who had been the research partner of Nobel laureate Bernard Katz and had previously directed the Institute of Biophysics at University College London. When the budget cuts introduced under Margaret Thatcher seriously affected British science, Professor Miledi moved to the University of California in the second half of the 1980s and recruited his team, which is how I ended up in Irvine, California,” recalled Gábor Tigyi.

The year I owe to Katalin Karikó

His former colleague and Nobel laureate research partner Katalin Karikó also played an important role in launching his international career.

– I always tell Kati that I owe her a year of my life. In the early 1980s, she was the only person at our institute who had a tissue culture laboratory, but in 1982 she was admitted to the hospital because she had a high-risk pregnancy. I remember that my immediate supervisor, Kornél Kovács, and I cycled over to the clinic to ask whether we could use her laboratory, and she immediately said yes, so that someone could at least make good use of it. We cycled back to the Centre, and I was able to start working straight away instead of waiting for the necessary equipment. That saved me at least a year, or a year and a half, which I owe to Kati.

“We had nothing but our ideas”

According to Gábor Tigyi, this spirit of mutual support and resourcefulness played a major role in helping Hungarian scientists of his generation—including Katalin Karikó and the internationally renowned neuroscientist György Buzsáki, who also began his career in Pécs  - establish themselves in the highly competitive international scientific community and become leading figures in their respective fields.

“Both in Pécs and in Szeged, the fundamental mentality was to help one another because our equipment and supplies of laboratory chemicals were extremely limited or entirely unavailable, so that, with a bit of exaggeration, we had nothing but our ideas. At the SZBK, ordering chemicals took about a year, so we would simply go from one institute to another, asking colleagues whether they could spare the materials we needed for our experiments, and we usually managed to gather everything we needed by the end of the day. Meanwhile, research in Hungary was being carried out at an international level, for example, at the Department of Microbiology in Pécs, Tivadar Kontrohr and Béla Kocsis were studying the configuration in which an enzyme incorporates a hydrogen group into a bacterium. Given the technology available at the time, this was an enormous challenge, yet they achieved remarkable success, but they could not afford to publish their findings in the leading journal in biochemistry. So they submitted the manuscript with a letter explaining that unfortunately, they could not pay the publication fee, and the reviewers were so impressed by the manuscript that eventually two articles were published about the research. They gave me a chromatography equipment, which, with the permission of Professor Gábor Kelényi, I assembled in a disused mortuary because the university’s cold rooms were being renovated during the summer break. We succeeded in separating the proteins, and the result was the first paper submitted from Hungary on monoclonal antibodies, published in the prestigious journal Molecular Immunology in 1983.”

Given all this, it is not surprising that the young Hungarian researchers seized every opportunity they could.

“I think what the three of us had in common was that our education in Hungary gave us strong foundations, and that we also had a strong work ethic and dedication. We realised that we had been given an opportunity others may not receive, and that such a chance comes only once in a lifetime. We had to make the very most of it. Kati Karikó was a little farther away from us, working on the East Coast, whereas Gyuri Buzsáki was doing his research in San Diego, only about fifty miles from where I was, which, by American standards, is not considered far. Kati had a much harder path than I did because the scientific community was far more reluctant to accept the work that eventually led to RNA vaccines than it was to accept my research. In my case, too, it took several years before people accepted that the lipid molecule I discovered in 1986 was one of the critical survival factors for stem cells. We finally received funding around 1990, and only then could the real research begin.”

The joy of unexpected discovery

That research has continued to this day, as Gábor Tigyi’s discovery of the signalling function of lysophosphatidic acid opened up new perspectives in several fields, including the treatment of cancer and cardiovascular diseases, as well as protection against radiation, while another of his research projects may eventually revolutionise the treatment of tooth decay. His discoveries, the research that followed, and the drugs that have since entered clinical practice all illustrate how findings in basic research can lead to exciting, and often entirely unexpected opportunities.

“Professor Romhányi often used the term serendipity in his lectures, the closest Hungarian translation of which would probably be an unexpected or accidental discovery. I learned from him just how unpredictable the course of scientific research can be—something which I later experienced myself. Quite often we carefully design and carry out an experiment, only to find that the results are nothing like what we expected. Our first reaction is to ask ourselves what we might have done wrong, then it turns out that the experiment was carried out perfectly, and the problem was the original hypothesis. At that point, we begin looking for a different direction, and if we are fortunate, an experiment that initially seemed uninteresting can lead to something entirely new and unexpectedly interesting: that is serendipity.”

Besides his own research, Gábor Tigyi also considers mentoring young scientists one of his missions. He has helped launch the careers of more than fifty young researchers and regularly teaches medical students all over the world, including the United States, Japan, Taiwan, Budapest and, in earlier years, Pécs. While he believes that artificial intelligence will become an extremely efficient tool for the future of scientific research, he also emphasises that young scientists must ensure that AI does not suppress the curiosity and creativity on which research ultimately depends.

“I have been teaching a course called The Art of Scientific Writing since 2000, and ever since artificial intelligence appeared, I always advise my students not to use it when writing their first scientific paper. That first paper is like their firstborn child, and it is their first opportunity to describe and explain an idea, a thought or a concept that comes from their own minds. That is something they should not hand over to technology. Fortunately, most of them accept my advice.

At the same time, if used properly, artificial intelligence can be capable of remarkable things because none of us can compete with the sheer amount of knowledge it can access. Used wisely, it can extremely accelerate both the process of discovery and the practice of medicine, but an important principle is that the final decision must always remain ours: it is not the artificial intelligence that takes the Hippocratic Oath but us.

From the Squirrel Patrol to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences

Although Gábor Tigyi has spent the past 40 years working abroad, he has maintained close ties with Hungary. He is an external member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Association of Hungarian American Academics, and a research professor at the Semmelweis University Institute of Clinical Pathophysiology. He visits Hungary three or four times a year, and his favourite places in Pécs are all connected to the Medical School.

“I literally grew up at and with the university, since during my childhood and teenage years, this campus was being built under my father’s supervision, who took it very seriously that everything was completed on schedule, so instead of going to a pastry shop on Sunday afternoons, we would come here to check on the construction work. We lived on Fogaras Street, right next to the university, and my friends and I would climb over the kitchen fence, and within moments we were in the park. We played football on the sandy ground next to the swimming pool and hide-and-seek among the bushes. My first job was here as well, long before I became a student: at the age of thirteen, I worked in the kitchen as a “levelling boy”. It was quite a unique job. Meals were loaded onto heated food trolleys, which were taken down by the freight lift into the underground tunnel, where electric towing vehicles transported them to the clinics, where the meals were distributed to the wards. The freight lift, however, was a rather primitive piece of equipment and rarely stopped exactly on the same level as the floors. That created a real problem because the food trolleys could easily tip over while being unloaded, spilling the meals. My job as a levelling boy was to keep adjusting the lift with the up and down buttons until it lined up perfectly with the floor so that the trolleys could be unloaded from the lift.”

As a teenager, he also spent time in the university’s auto repair shop, where he worked as the assistant of master mechanic Attila Toldi and learned a great deal about bringing worn-out cars back to life, but perhaps the most surprising and far-reaching experience of Gábor Tigyi’s childhood is in connection with the Squirrel Patrol and the rescue of the former Vasváry Villa.

“At primary school, I was the leader of the Squirrel Patrol in the Young Pioneers, and one day we set off on an excursion, travelling in my father’s car among others. One of the members of our patrol lived in the Vasváry Villa, which at that time served as a residential building, and we had arranged to meet in front of the house at eight o’clock in the morning. We waited for fifteen minutes and he did not come out, so we went inside and knocked on their door. That was the first time my father had ever seen the building from the inside and that is when he got the idea that it should become the headquarters of the Regional Committee of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. The university and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences headquarters: these are still the first places I visit and where I stay whenever I come to Pécs, as well as the Pogány Airport, where I used to go gliding. I consider myself a fortunate person because whether I travel to the United States or to Hungary, I feel I am coming home to old and new friends no matter in which direction I am travelling.

Photos:

Dávid Verébi