Gyorffy Brown

* Szepesbéla, July 18, 1911 – † Budapest, August 5, 1970 / botanist, plant geneticist, plant biochemist, university professor, posthumous corresponding member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences ; ; son of István Győrffy and Irma Julianna Győrffyné Greisiger. He graduated from the Szeged gymnasium. Influenced by his parents, he chose natural history and obtained a natural history-chemistry teaching certificate at the University of Szeged in 1935, and was awarded a doctorate in humanities in 1936. In 1936–1939, he worked at the General Zoological Institute of the University of Szeged, in 1939–1944 at the Biological Research Institute of Tihany, and in 1944–1948 as the head of the biological and genetic laboratory at the Plant Breeding Institute of Mosonmagyaróvár. In 1937–1939 he was an exchange scholar at the Wilhelm Kaiser Biological Institute in Berlin-Dahlem. In 1943 he was qualified as a private teacher at the University of Cluj-Napoca. From 1948 until his death he was the head of the Institute of Plant Genetics and Agrobiology in Budapest, and then of the Genetics Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. In 1948–1951 he also headed the Department of Biology at the University of Agricultural Sciences in Budapest. He achieved outstanding results in the fields of physiological and biochemical genetics, such as organ sizes, osmosis measures, colchicine-induced polyploidy and evolutionary genetics. He has published several papers on this topic in professional journals. In contrast to the Lysenkoian heredity approach that was almost dominant in the socialist countries in the 1950s, he represented a much more modern and ultimately generally accepted molecular genetic approach in Hungary. In addition to his work on plant genetics, his research on evolutionary genetics was also significant, and in the 1960s he also dealt with human and population genetics. In the 1960s, he took a serious role in the scientific debates against the residual theories characterized by Lysenko. He received the Kossuth Prize in 1949. In 1967, he was nominated as a corresponding member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, but was ultimately not elected due to political pressure. Only twenty years after his death, in 1990, did the Hungarian Academy of Sciences decide to retroactively consider him a corresponding member. At the same time, he was also posthumously awarded the Széchenyi Prize for establishing domestic plant genetics. ; ; His main works: ; Chromosome counts in polyploids produced by colchicine, 1940, ; Mechanism of action of colchicine: Colchicine-induced polyploidy, 1940, ; Physiology of polyploid plants, 1941, ; On vitamin C in peppers, 1942, ; On the vitamin C content of tomatoes, 1943, ; Genes and enzymes, 1943, ; On the biochemical aspects of changes in the metabolic type of plants, 1953, ; Mutation as an evolutionary factor, 1964, ; From Mendel's factors to the genetic code, 1967.