Matskási István (szerk.): A Magyar Természettudományi Múzeum évkönyve 90. (Budapest 1998)

Papp, L.: In memoriam Dr. Ferenc Mihályi (1906-1997)

From 1928 to 1933 he served as an assistant for the Gipsy Moth Laboratory at Budapest, which was set up by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in order to get, identify and export the parasitoids (mainly tachinid flies) for the control of that pest, which had been introduced from Europe. There were summers when 300,000 to 400,000 caterpillars were reared in the laboratory. FERENC MIHÁLYI made all the rearings, packed the parasitoids (pupae, etc.) and kept the files of data. There are several species which were successfully introduced into the USA for the biological control of gipsy moth as a result of that campaign. Unfortunately only a rather small part of the results was published. His masters, Drs P. B. DOWDEN and W. F. SELLERS made detailed yearly reports, but only some data were published in one or two papers. However, as he said repeatedly, in addition to a safe job and good salary, that job provided him a good possibility to learn laboratory methods and much in ecology. His six years with the Gipsy Moth Laboratory was a turning point in his life. He took very much interest also in graphics and music (as for the latter, since his childhood), but those were the years when he decided to work lifelong as a scientist. His good abilities in graphics were highly profitable later, when he produced most of the illustrations for his papers and books. Those were the years of a long and deep economic crisis in Hungary. His experience with insects should have qualified him for a number of jobs; contrarily, he did not get one. The Council of the Hungarian Jobless Graduates (Állástalan Diplomások Országos Bizottsága) nominated him for a position in the Department of Zoology of the Hungarian National Museum. That working place was in the Hungarian Biological Research Institute (Magyar Biológiai Kutatóintézet) at Tihany (Central West Hungary), whose Department of Hydrobiology was attached to the Zoological Department (HNM) at that time. He worked there for three years (1934-36). He studied the anatomy and histology of insects and also the subject of his doctoral thesis was the microscopical structure of the flight organs of the house fly. His first scientific papers were published in those years. In the meantime, the Institute was reorganized. He was on the horns of a dilemma: should he remain on the staff of the Zoological Department of the HNM, and if so, he return to Budapest, or should he join the body of the Hungarian Biological Research Institute, and stay henceforward in Tihany. Having had a family by that time with a flat in Tihany, he remained with the site and not with the institution. However, in 1936 he returned to Budapest (the reasons are not clear to me), where a job was offered to him in the National Public Health Institute in their Department of Parasitology. That Department was headed by FERENC LŐRINCZ, one of the classical authorities of Hungarian parasitology. They needed a dipterologist for their two projects: in the control of malaria {Plasmodium vivax malaria was endemic at Hungary in that time), and in the war against enteric (typhoid) fever. FERENC MIHÁLYI studied the vector mosquitoes (at that time they were named as "the varieties" of Anopheles maculipennis), their morphology, habits, and also the prevalence of malaria nationwide. He set up the first malaria study site at Letenye (SW Hungary). His other theme was a basic study of enteric (typhoid) fever, with particular emphasis on the dipterous vectors of its causative agents. He studied species composition and abundance of those muscoid flies which had been named as "synanthropic flies" even earlier.