Try to imagine if you were a kid in Hungary during Communism. No pop music, no fashion, no shopping, no parties, no dances, no movies, no games. Or to put it simply, no fun. That’s when I was born and there was literally nothing for kids to do in Communist Hungary, except study. If you didn’t grow up in this kind of environment, I’ll try to give you an idea of what it was like. If you had a similar childhood, well, some of this may feel like old times.
We had television. Exactly two hours each night, one channel only, and it was almost all heavily censored news and propaganda. On Saturdays, from three to four in the afternoon, we were allowed just one hour of pop music. That’s when life as I knew it stopped. I sat glued to the radio for that one magical hour every Saturday afternoon listening in awe to the Beatles. More importantly, it helped me realize that outside my heavily regulated existence, life was very different.
Shopping was not a particularly pleasurable experience, either. It didn’t matter if you had money to spend or not. The stores carried a choice of one kind of skirt: pleated in regulation navy. Your only real choice was to buy one or not. Blouses were white or yellow and they rarely had the right size for a teenager, so shopping, even window-shopping, was as exciting as watching the same widget roll off a factory assembly line over and over and over again.
Of course, we could go to the movies. But how many movies can you watch about how happy and hopeful the peasants and industrial workers’ lives were under Communism? At the time, the images on the screen reminded me of how unhappy and hopeless my life seemed, and I felt I was better off studying than “sitting in the dark” with the rest of the masses. So I studied physics, chemistry, biology, Latin, English, German, and I took great comfort that these textbooks, unlike our history books, were not re-written by ruling party bureaucrats. Every time I opened a science or math textbook, I felt like I had a connection to the world beyond Communism, a world I desired to know more about. Studying was my way of trying to take control of my life, if such a thing in was possible in Communist Hungary.
When I was nine years old, I got my first lesson in making beauty products. My aunt began to make her famous bee pollen face cream for the neighborhood ladies, and of course, I was right there “helping” her. You have to realize that during Communism, any kind of private enterprise was strictly forbidden, and even making and selling face cream was against the law. So we worked behind closed doors and drawn curtains. And soon, her creams became so famous that hundreds of women came to buy them. They arrived at night like members of the “Beauty Underground” and knocked in code on the kitchen window. But eventually the Authorities got suspicious. One night, the Secret Police raided her home and they confiscated and destroyed all of her creams. They shut us down and my aunt narrowly escaped going to prison. It was a terrible night I will never forget. Yet years after my aunt died, ladies still came hoping for her special homemade cream and some conversation.
After the confrontation with the police, I returned to my life of constant study. I felt like some Monk from the Medieval Ages, only instead of illuminating manuscripts I learned classic literature, piano, ballet, more languages and, of course, more sciences. I thought any chance for excitement was finished after this single, bright, brief and fascinating episode of cream making. Life was bleak during Communism. But I learned a lot and I earned a Ph.D. in Neuroscience at the very early age of twenty-two.
After I received my degree, I decided to go all by myself to the United States of America. This was a radical idea but I could not see myself listening to censored news, watching censored movies or reading censored books and newspapers for the rest of my life; and so my father spent his entire life’s savings to buy me a one-way plane ticket to New York. After he bought the ticket, he had the equivalent of $40 dollars left in his pocket and he gave me that too for spending money. My father sacrificed everything he had for me without knowing what would happen to me in America. But he knew my alternatives if I stayed and he decided to help me escape, even if that meant perhaps not seeing each other again.
I arrived in New York and did not know a single soul. I had no relatives, no friends, not even a single acquaintance. There was no one to welcome me or help me settle down. It was the most difficult thing I attempted in my 22 years, but there was no choice. I had to find my own way and all I had was my ambition, my intelligence and my father’s last forty dollars.
Eight months of unimaginable struggle for survival later, I landed a post-doctoral Fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania. The position paid nothing, but their medical library was beyond compare. This may not seem like a big deal to you, but the library was open until midnight every day, even on Sunday. In Hungary, the library closed at 6:00 pm without exception. I was thrilled to have access to so much information, and I spent endless hours trying to make up for lost time. This baffled the head of the Department at Penn. He had never seen anyone who asks for nothing and works around the clock. I guess he had never been to Hungary. He liked me a lot and eventually we published many scientific papers together.
One day I was invited to give a lecture at Harvard Medical School on the brain studies we conducted at Penn. I studied day and night, wrote the lecture, memorized it and on a Tuesday, very early in the morning, went to Boston. The lecture went very well. Fifty people, all in white coats, clapped enthusiastically. The head of the department offered me a fellowship at Harvard right then and there. Harvard was great. It taught me how little I knew and spurred me to go to medical school. When the time came I applies to one medical school only, Cornell in Manhattan. I got in, and received a full scholarship to study medicine. I was the oldest in my class and felt totally out of place among my young Ivy League classmates. For the first time I began to experience the uneasy feeling that comes with getting older. I developed an overwhelming interest in research intended to control the aging process. After completing medical school and residency at Cornell Medical College at New York Hospital Medical Center, I opened an anti-aging medical practice in Manhattan.
It must have been an idea whose time had come, because a few months later the New York Times wrote a two-page article about my clinic. Two days later I was in Good Morning America and a few weeks after that on 20/20, in a segment dedicated to the subject of anti aging. My success confirmed what I have always believed: growing old gracefully is no longer an option in our world. Today we live longer than ever and enter the prime of our lives much later than ever. We start out with a prolonged childhood and continue with a prolonged education. Then there's the intense career building phase, a prolonged mate selection phase, followed by delayed child bearing. When middle age sets in, we often find ourselves in the most demanding, stressful, active and productive stage of our lives, only to realize that we now are lacking the mental energy, focus and physical stamina of youth. We are trying to live a younger person's life in a middle-aged body, which leads to a critical question: How can we postpone the start of middle age? This is no longer a question of vanity. It is a question of survival.
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