A quiet revolutionary of the scientific world, genius and discoverer Albert Szent-Gyorgyi (1893–1986) was born in Budapest, Hungary, into a family of landowners. From an early age, he sought to understand life’s mysteries with a sense of reverence and curiosity.

“Very often, when you look for one thing, you find something else,” he reflected — a humble truth at the heart of all discovery.

He served bravely in World War I before earning his medical degree in 1917. During World War II, he risked everything to help the resistance against Nazi occupation. With resilience and quiet courage, he later immigrated to the United States in 1947, where he would continue his life's work with openhearted determination.

On human nature, he observed with gentle insight, “When everyone begins to laugh at you, then you know you are two steps ahead.”

His personal journey was not without sorrow. After losing both his wife and daughter to cancer, he turned grief into purpose. For over four decades, he passionately pursued research in hopes of finding a cure — a lifetime of compassion woven into scientific endeavor.

“Life is a wondrous phenomenon,” he explained — and his every action honored that wonder with a full-hearted embrace of life’s preciousness and fragility.

In 1928, he isolated vitamin C from Hungarian paprika, a momentous achievement that earned him the 1937 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine. He later received the Lasker Award for pioneering research into heart muscle contraction. Yet through it all, he remained modest, grounded, and kind.

“The key to happiness is not to get more,” he said, “but to enjoy what we have — to fill the empty frame of our lives instead of enlarging it.” His message endures, gentle and true: a life of meaning comes from loving what already is.