Szent-Györgyi’s Official Nobel Prize Lecture at the Karolinska Institutet of Stockholm – December 11, 1937

The day after the Nobel banquet, on December 11, starting exactly at noon, Szent-Györgyi delivered his official Nobel Prize lecture, titled “Oxidation, Energy Transfer, and Vitamins.” The lecture took place in the auditorium of the Institute of Pathology at Karolinska Institutet. For laureates awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, this mandatory program is always held at Karolinska Institutet, the medical university of Stockholm. The large, distinguished audience included Szent-Györgyi’s wife and daughter, the entire teaching staff of Karolinska, Hungarian Ambassador to Stockholm Péter Matuska, Hungarian Consul-General Petterson, Hungarian Consul Frithjof Trulsson, and many representatives of the scientific world and the Swedish elite. Laced with humor, Szent-Györgyi’s humble and light-hearted lecture captivated even the typically reserved Swedish audience.

Szent-Györgyi spoke of his research in German, consistently highlighting the contributions of his “loyal” collaborators and mentioning them by name. He recounted the various stages of his career, giving an account of his achievements at each stage. He began by describing the excitement he felt upon unexpectedly discovering an unknown substance while working in the “small and dark cellar room” that served as his laboratory in Groningen. To the audience, the road to identifying vitamin C, full of unexpected twists and turns, must have seemed like a grand adventure in Szent-Györgyi’s telling.

He concluded his lecture with the following thoughts: “From the moment I seized my staff, a novice in search of knowledge, and left my devastated fatherland to tread the wanderer’s path – which has not been without its privations – as an unknown and penniless novice, from that moment to the present one, I always felt myself to belong to a great, international, spiritual family. Always and everywhere I found helping hands, friendship, cooperation and international solidarity. I owe it solely to this spirit of our science that I did not succumb, and that my endeavors are now crowned with the highest human recognition, the award of the Nobel Prize. This Nobel Prize, too, is but a fruit of this spirit, of this pan-human solidarity. I can but hope, my heart filled with gratitude, that this spirit may be preserved and that it may spread its bounteous rays beyond the limits of our knowledge, over the whole of humanity.”

Shown here is the first page of Szent-Györgyi’s lecture in English. The full text can be accessed via the following link: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/1937/szent-gyorgyi/lecture/ (Last accessed: September 10, 2021)