I was born in Hungary during the height of Communism. Life was bleak for a kid during that time. No TV, no pop music, no fashion, no shopping, no parties, no dances, no movies, no games… nothing. There was literally nothing else for a kid to do in Communist Hungary except study.
We had two hours of television broadcasting a night—one channel only—and it was mostly heavily censored news. The highlight of the week: we had one hour of pop music on Saturdays between 3:00 and 4:00. Life, as we knew it, stopped for that hour. We were glued to the radio, listening to the Beatles in awe for that one magical hour each Saturday afternoon.
Shopping was not much fun either. The stores carried a choice of exactly one kind of skirt: pleated, in navy. Your choice was to buy one or not. Blouses came in two colors, white or yellow and rarely came in the right size for a teenager, so shopping was out.
There were no dances and no parties because there was no pop music, so what was the use? The movies were mostly about Hungarian peasants and industrial workers, showing how happy and hopeful their lives had become now that Communism had set in. You were really better off studying.
I studied physics, chemistry, biology, Latin, English, and German. I took great comfort in the fact that at least these textbooks were not rewritten by the ruling party, unlike our history books. Studying made me feel like I had a connection to the world beyond Communism—a world I knew little about, but I knew existed, or at least I hoped it did.
When I was nine years old, my aunt began to make her famous bee pollen face cream for the ladies in the neighborhood. Of course, I was right there “helping” her. During the height of Communism, any kind of private enterprise was strictly forbidden, so we had to work behind closed doors and drawn curtains. Soon, her creams became well-known and hundreds of women came to buy them. Even though they mostly came at night, in secrecy, knocking on the kitchen window, eventually the authorities took notice. The secret police came in one night, confiscated and destroyed all the creams, and shut us down. My aunt narrowly escaped going to jail. I will never forget that night. Years after my aunt’s untimely death, ladies still came to seek her cream and to talk about her.
I studied classic literature, piano, ballet, more languages, and more sciences. That is all I did, as I recall, other than this bright, brief, and fascinating episode of cream making. Life was bleak during Communism, but you learned a lot. I earned a Ph.D. in Neuroscience at the very early age of 22.
I came to the US by myself at age 22, not knowing a single soul. No relatives, however remote; no friends; no acquaintances; nothing. It was the single most difficult thing I have ever done, but there was no choice. I could not see myself listening to news or reading books and newspapers rewritten by the ruling party for the rest of my life. My father spent his entire life savings on a one-way plane ticket to New York. He had $40 left, and he gave that to me too, for spending money when I arrived in America. It still gives me chills to remember seeing them at the railway station when I left, because we all thought that this was the last time.
About eight months of unimaginable struggle for survival ensued, and then I landed a post-doctoral Fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania. It did not pay anything at first, but they had a medical library that was beyond compare. The library was open until midnight every single day, even on Sunday. I was fascinated by this fact because, in Hungary, the university library closed at 6:00 without exception. I spent endless hours there trying to make up for lost time.
The head of the department at Penn was baffled by me at first. He had never seen anyone who asked for nothing and worked around the clock. I guess he had never been to Hungary. He liked me a lot; we published many scientific papers together on how the right and left sides of the brain differ and how the brain organizes sustained attentional response. We published in journals like Science and Nature—which I did not even realize at the time was a very big deal.
One day, I was invited to give a lecture at the Neurology Department at Harvard Medical School on the brain studies we conducted at Penn. When I received the letter of invitation, my blood froze for a second; I was sure there was a mistake and it was addressed to the wrong person. I called, learned it was indeed meant for me, and terror set in. I studied day and night, memorized the entire lecture including the jokes, and on a Tuesday, very early in the morning, went to Boston. I was in a bad state; I threw up in the taxi on the way to Harvard. When I arrived, I went to the bathroom, cleaned up, looked in the mirror, and realized that it couldn't get much worse than this. It could only get better. Something clicked in my head about “having nothing to lose,” and I went for it.
The lecture went really well. Fifty people, all in white coats, clapped enthusiastically. The head of the department, a man of few words, stood up, called the ideas brilliant, and offered me a fellowship at Harvard right then and there. I accepted, mostly because I was hopelessly in love with him by the end of the evening.
The love story went nowhere—I never once said or hinted at anything—but Harvard was great. It made me realize how little I really knew and spurred me to go to medical school. When the time came, I applied to only one medical school: Cornell, in Manhattan. For those who know anything about applying to medical school, this move was nearly suicidal. Normally, you apply to about 20 schools and hope to get into one or two. I had no idea how it was done. I wouldn't have been able to afford the application fees for 20 schools anyway, so it was better I didn't know. I got in, received a full scholarship to study medicine at Cornell, and for one day—the day I was accepted—I felt really light and happy. It did not last long.
I was the oldest in the class and felt totally out of place among my bright, young Ivy League classmates—many of them much younger, born in the US, and bred on sports, TV, pop music, and fast food. I was a good student, but it did not come as easily to me as it did to my younger classmates. For the first time, I began to develop an uneasy feeling that maybe I was getting older. So, I developed an overwhelming interest in all research intended to control the aging process, in an effort to stay young and healthy for as long as possible.
So, this is how I got started.