Imre Szorenyi

* Vágmedence, May 12, 1905 – † Budapest, January 17, 1959 / biochemist, member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences ; ; He completed his studies at the University of Budapest. While still a university student, he carried out scientific work in the department of Pál Hári, and his first publications were published before he received his medical degree (1929). After completing his studies, he worked in Basel with Frigyes Verzár (1886–1979), and then in Berlin at the institute of Otto Warburg (1883–1970). During this time, he was interested in the questions of the digestibility of lipids, the chemical effect of light on cells, and the influence of cations on yeast fermentation processes. In the 1930s, he emigrated to the USSR to escape the spread of fascism, and from 1934 to 1950 he headed the Department of Biochemistry of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences and, in parallel, the Department of Biochemistry of the Academy of Microbiology. His work here was characterized by the study of muscle training and muscle metabolism, the metabolism of healthy and pathological nervous tissue, and the mechanism of the Pasteur reaction. From 1944, he primarily studied muscle proteins, and was among the first to determine the effect of myosin adenosine triphosphatase, and in connection with this, the phosphorylation of myosin and the cleavage of phosphomyosin. He returned home in 1950. He founded the Institute of Biochemistry of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, of which he was the director until his death. He actually headed it only from 1953, because in 1951 he traveled to the Soviet Union, where his heart disease prevented him from returning home for a long time. In the last years of his life, he and his colleagues investigated the relationship between the chemical structure and biological role of enzymes, and achieved internationally recognized results in this field. The Hungarian Academy of Sciences elected him a corresponding member in 1950, and a full member in 1953. ; ; His main works: ; The Influence of Alkali Cations on the Fermentation Capacity of Yeast (with A. Lasnitzki, The Biochemical Journal), 1935, ; Studien über den Mechanismus des Pasteurschen Reaktion (Ukrainian Biochemical Journal), 1940, ; Az ízom phosphocreatine-adenosine diphosphate transferase-ja e konkurento az actomyosinnal (with R. G. Gyegtar, Ukrainian Biochemical Journal), 1948, ; On some questions of the separation and function of muscle proteins, 1951, ; On some current questions of theoretical protein research (MTA Biological and Medical Journal), 1956, ; On some questions of the relationship between the chemical structure and biological function of enzymes, 1959, Comparative studies on D-glyceraldehyde-3- phosphate dehydrogenase (with Gertrud Szabolcsi and Etelka Biszku), 1959.