March 20, 1998
Journal: The Brain Drain Continues in Hungary
By JANE PERLEZ
UDAPEST, Hungary -- He was a man of brilliant and diverse intellectual energy who discovered the nuclear chain reaction, went on to help develop the atom bomb and then tirelessly campaigned against it.
He soaked in the bath three hours a day, thinking up incredible inventions, needled his scientific colleagues with puckish humor, and was so lazy that he refused to flush his toilet in his room at the University of Chicago in the 1940s, insisting that was "maid's work."
So it was with ambivalent pride and a sense of lost glory that Hungary celebrated the centenary of Leo Szilard, who died in 1964. Szilard (pronounced SIH-lahrd) was perhaps the most quixotic of the renowned physicists and mathematicians who were born and educated in Hungary but who fled, often, like Szilard, under the shadow of anti-Semitism, to the United States.
Hungarian scientists have had a deep impact on the 20th century. John von Neumann made fundamental contributions to quantum theory as well as the development of the atomic bomb and the high-speed electronic computer. Albert von Szent-Gyorgyi was credited with first isolating Vitamin C.
For a country of its population (10 million), Hungary has produced an inordinate number of Nobel Prize winners. Hungarians who became American citizens, including Szilard, Eugene Wigner and Edward Teller, played a major part in the Manhattan Project in World War II.
But few in this pantheon of Martians -- a nickname spun from the scientists' superhuman intelligence and their unearthly Hungarian language -- so keenly felt that the pursuit of science also carried political and personal responsibilities.
"The Hungarians have plenty of first-rate scientists and Nobel Laureates to celebrate," said Szilard's American biographer, William Lanouette, who was among those at the ceremonies in February. "Yet Szilard alone personifies the moral and ethical responsibilities of science. He had the drive to foresee the social and political consequences of discovery."
Lanouette records in his book "Genius in the Shadows" how Szilard, at the start of the war, drafted the letter signed by Albert Einstein that urged President Roosevelt to speed up work on the nuclear bomb before the Germans developed it; after the war, he spent much of his time trying to ease the arms race that he helped create.
With a combination of banter and logic, Szilard persuaded Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader, that a hot line between the Kremlin and the White House was a good idea. During the Eisenhower and Kennedy years, he flooded the State Department with nuclear disarmament programs that were mostly rebuffed.
A tubby figure who loved to eat fatty Hungarian delicacies and who wore suspenders, Szilard was often thought of as maddeningly eccentric. Sometimes this eccentricity produced breathtaking flights of fancy: He came up with the idea of electrifying barbers' chairs so that a man's hair would stand on end, allowing the barber to do a fast mowing job.
For Hungarian intellectuals who remained in Hungary, Szilard and his emigre colleagues represent a bittersweet phenomenon. On the one hand, there is pride that Hungary has produced so many important minds. Yet there is also sadness that so many fled -- and that the new generation of best brains continues to leave.
Now, instead of being enticed by the ferment in German and American universities as their elders were between the two world wars, young Hungarian scientists are wooed abroad by Western companies offering fabulous research possibilities and the kind of pay they could only dream about here.
"Today, the most gifted Hungarians leave the country while they are graduate students," said Gabor Pallo, the deputy director of the philosophy institute at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
After more than 40 years of communism and a rough transition to a market economy, Hungary lacked the financial resources to keep them. "Even the scientific libraries are collapsing," Pallo said.
In the popular mythology, this crew of geniuses are shadowy figures in Hungary. For most of the Cold War, they were considered soldiers in the enemy camp and banned in the media and school texts. Then in the early 1980s, when the Hungarian leader Janos Kadar was eager to improve his nation's profile in the West and wanted to pump up sagging intellectual morale at home, the emigre scientists were dusted off.
Pallo said that by 1983, he was allowed to publish some of his research on the scientists and in 1985 he was asked to give a lecture at the prestigious Academy of Sciences on Hungarian-born Nobel Prize winners. Some of the scientists came back in their old age for short visits before the collapse of communism; the fiercely anti-communist Teller waited until after 1989.
But like Andrew Grove, who as a young science student fled Hungary after the failed 1956 uprising and is now chairman and chief executive of the computer giant Intel, Szilard showed little interest in Hungary, Pallo said.
Even so, Szilard is now buried here. At least, part of him.
Szilard's ashes, kept in a California crematory after his death, were reburied in a cemetery during the centenary ceremonies. According to his family's wishes, half of his ashes were sent to Budapest. The other half were dispatched to upstate New York, where his wife is buried.
This is not quite what Szilard had in mind. Before he died in La Jolla, Calif., he said he wanted his ashes tied to a helium balloon and sent into the sky. People, he said, should look up rather than down.