George Klein (biologist)

Georg Klein

George Klein, Georg Klein or Klein György (July 28, 1925) is a Hungarian-Swedish biologist who specializes in cancer research. Klein has also authored a dozen of non-scientific or wide ranging books, of which several are collections of essays.

Klein started a tumor biology center at Karolinska Institute and made a connection there between the Epstein-Barr virus and lymphomas and other cancers.[1] He was awarded the $100,000 prize by the General Motors Cancer Research Foundation for pioneering work on cancer and the human immunity system.[2]

Apart from his scientific work, he has written popular books of which three have been translated to English: The Atheist and the Holy City (1990) (Swedish: Ateisten och den heliga staden), Pietà (1992), a collection of essays on whether life is worth living, and Live Now (1997).

Since settling in Sweden in 1947, Klein has spelled his surname Georg in Swedish and George in English.

Background

George and Eva Klein in 1979[2]

Klein was born as Klein György to an assimilated Jewish family in the Carpathian Mountains of the Hungarian-speaking part of what is now Eastern Slovakia, and at the age of five moved to Budapest, Hungary. He attended the Berzsenyi Gymnasium.[3]

Klein has written in Pietà and elsewhere about his experiences during the Holocaust as a teenager in Budapest, during the German invasion of Hungary. Between May and July 1944, 437,000 Hungarian Jews were deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp to be "resettled," according to the Germans, but most were in fact sent to the gas chambers. In May or June 1944 Klein was working as an assistant for the Jewish Council in Budapest, and saw an eyewitness report about what was happening in Auschwitz. The report had been compiled by Rudolf Vrba (1924–2006) and Alfréd Wetzler (1918–1988), who had escaped from the camp in April that year. It warned that most of those arriving at the camp were being killed.[4]

Klein tried to warn relatives and friends, but many, particularly the older generation, did not believe what the report said. Klein has written about his feelings as a Cassandra figure, telling the truth but not being believed. When his own time came to board one of the trains, he decided instead to run, which almost certainly saved his life.[4] Decades later, he looked for Vrba, then a professor of pharmacology in Canada, to thank him, and subsequently wrote about him and his report in two essays, "The Ultimate Fear of the Traveler Returning from Hell" in Pietà – first published in Sweden in 1989 – and "Confronting the Holocaust: An Eyewitness Account" (2011) in The Auschwitz Reports and the Holocaust in Hungary, edited by Randolph L. Braham and William vanden Heuvel.

Personal life

Klein moved to Sweden in 1947.[5] He is married to Eva Klein, also a biologist, and has a son Peter, a mathematician with a Ph.D. from Columbia University.

Notes

  1. ↑ Rohlén-Wohlgemuth, Hilde. Svensk-judisk litteratur 1775-1994: en litteraturhistorisk översikt, 1995, p. 33: "Georg Klein (1925-) från Budapest är en världsberömd cancerforskare och professor vid Karolinska Institutet i Stockholm."
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 "Klein, George", National Cancer Institute.
  3. ↑ Marx, George. The Voice of the Martians: Hungarian Scientists Who Shaped the 20th Century in the West. Akadémiai Kiadó, 2001, p. 71: "Georg Klein, recipient of the Letterstedt Prize in Stockholm, was born in the Carpatian Mountains in 1925, but moved to Budapest at the age of 5. He attended the Berzsenyi Gymnasium."
    • Also see Liska, Vivian and Nolden, Thomas. Contemporary Jewish Writing in Europe: A Guide. Indiana University Press, 2008, p. 67.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 Klein, George (2011). "Confronting the Holocaust: An Eyewitness Account," in Randolph L. Braham and William vanden Heuvel. The Auschwitz Reports and the Holocaust in Hungary. Columbia University Press.
  5. ↑ Stenberg, Peter. Contemporary Jewish Writing In Sweden: An Anthology. University of Nebraska Press, 2004, p. 137.

External links