Page 20 - CBAC Newsletter 2015

Growing Up: From Hungary to New York
to St. Louis

I grew up in Budapest and was always
curious about how things worked and I
liked math. After the 1956 Hungarian
Revolution and 2+ years in Austria, we
immigrated to the US to Brooklyn NY in
1959, where, I later attended Brooklyn
Technical High School – one of NYCs
special high schools. My career choice
was influenced by my exposure as an
undergrad in ’analytical’ engineering to
faculty at Cornell and as a grad student,
initially in Theoretical and Applied
Mechanics and later in Theoretical Physics
at Caltech. As a student of Kip S Thorne,
my PhD thesis concerned the generation
of gravitational waves. However, while at
Caltech, I also learned the value of
mathematical (theoretical) approaches to
solving problems in the life sciences from
the work of one of my teachers, George
Zweig. Although he was a theorist – and
independently invented what is now called
the quark model (he called them Aces), he
made seminal advances in the
understanding of cochlear mechanics and
physiology by discovering what he called
the ‘cochlear transform’. What he actually Sándor J. Kovács (center) and members of his research group. Front row L to
R: Nigel Hussain, Keshav Kohli. Standing, L to R: Mikhail Golman, Sándor J.
did was independently discover wavelets Kovács, Leonid Shmuylovich
based on analysis of the behavior/
characteristics/ properties of a well-defined biophysical system. In my view that was very, very exciting and provided
compelling evidence to me for the existence of a deep relationship between mathematical physics and life scienc-
es, beyond Wigner’s 1960 observation regarding “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural
Sciences."
I chose cardiology because it allows for mathematical modeling of a dynamic/kinematic physiologic system. I learned
quickly that in medicine pattern recognition is valuable, even if mechanistic understanding is incomplete. This
provided a fertile realm for using mechanistic and causality-based approaches in identifying and solving practical
problems in basic science/physiology with immediate clinical translation into the clinical realm.

With the advice I received from Eric Reiss MD at the University of Miami’s ‘PhD to MD Program’ where I trained, and
because of the quality of the Wash. U. faculty, I joined the faculty at Washington University in St. Louis in 1985.

14 | CBAC Center Heartbeat