Fraternity-Testvériség, 1958 (36. évfolyam, 1-11. szám)

1958-11-01 / 11. szám

4

FRATERNITY

over power in Hungary, von Békésy, consecrated to his profession and bound to the accuracy essential in a scientist’s search for the absolute truth, left his beloved country. He accepted the invitation of the famous Karolinska Institut in Stockholm, Sweden, and became a research professor there.

It was in 1949 that von Békésy came to the United States, where he is now a senior research fellow in psycho-physics at Harvard University.

His special field is otology — or the study of that amazing sense organ, the ear. And it was his practical work on adapting telephone receivers to the mechanics of the ear that led eventually —■ and logically — to the revision of the theory of hearing. What this will mean to the world is only partially delineated as yet, but considering the possibilities latent in this revision of the theory, one cannot help but think of the words of the great oratorio, “than shall the ears of the deaf he unstopped.”

H onors have come to him. Besides the Denker Prize already mentioned, von Békésy won the Guyot Prize for speech and otology at the Groningen University in 1939; he received the Leibnitz Medal from the German Academy of Science in 1937, the Academy Award from the Hungarian Academy of Science in 1946, the Shambough Prize in otology (1950), the Howard Crosby Warren Medal of the Society of Experimental Psychologists in 1955. In the same year the degree of M. D. was bestowed on him with honor by the Wilhelm University in Münster, Germany.

Von Békésy has succeeded in all that he has done — but perhaps in acquiring a scientist, we lost a writer. Consider the sheer poetry of the first paragraph of his dissertation on “The Ear”, published in the Scientific American -— and find another reason to he proud of him:

“The submarine and the airplane obviously owe their existence in part to the inspiration of Nature’s smaller but not less attractive prototypes — the fish and the bird. It cannot be said that the study of the living models has contributed much to the actual design of the machinery; indeed, the boot is on the other foot — for it is rather the machines that have helped us to understand how birds fly and fish swim. But engineers may nevertheless have something to learn from intensive study of the locomotion of these animals. Some of their performances are spectacular almost beyond belief, and raise remarkably interesting questions for both the biologist and the engineer.”