SZÖGEDiSzeged, as the locals tell itMagyar
Nobel Wall

Bonus trip · Gossip Walk

Nobel Wall

Újszeged tower block · Temesvári körút 36. · since 2023

Two Nobel laureates look down on the city from Szeged's tallest residential building. The subject of a third Nobel is researched in a Szeged laser centre.

In December 2023 two giant portraits went up on the 17-storey tower block in Újszeged, Szeged's tallest residential building: Albert Szent-Györgyi and Katalin Karikó. Karikó's portrait is 28 metres high and spans ten floors. It was painted by the Budapest group Színes Város.

In 1932 Szent-Györgyi produced vitamin C from Szeged paprika, and in 1937 he won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. 86 years later Katalin Karikó won the same prize, for the discoveries that made the mRNA vaccines possible.

Karikó came to Szeged for university in 1973. She lived in the Herman Ottó hall of residence for five years, met her husband in the canteen of the old Textile Works, they married at the City Hall, and their daughter was born at the Szeged maternity clinic. She graduated as a biologist, did her doctorate here and started working on RNA at the Szeged Biological Research Centre.

In 1985 she was let go in a round of job cuts. The family sold their car and hid 900 pounds in their little daughter's teddy bear: that's what they took to America. The daughter, Susan Francia, later became a two-time Olympic rowing champion.

In 2021, on Szeged Day, she became an honorary citizen. Whenever she comes back, she always eats halászlé. In October 2023, as a brand-new Nobel laureate, she was given the key to Szent-Györgyi's old office at Dóm tér 8 and gave a talk at the JATE Club, exactly 50 years after Szent-Györgyi had talked with students there.

In April 2024 she gave one of the authentic replicas of the medal to the University of Szeged and used the prize money to found the JATE Prize. In Tápé the medal was also woven from bulrush, and the mayor received it.

The third Nobel thread is the 2023 physics prize: attosecond light pulses are researched in Szeged, at the ELI ALPS laser centre. According to Telex, Ferenc Krausz played an important part in bringing the centre to Szeged, and co-laureate Anne L'Huillier helped design one of its instruments. When both visited Szeged, they were given custom Gömböcs bearing the length of their record pulses: 80 and 170 attoseconds.

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