I visited Szeged in 1987. Szeged is sort of the Boston of Hungary, thick with universities. Ironically, I went on an AFNOR (US Air Force research) Star Wars grant to present about GaAs defects. Iron Curtain countries were especially interested in defects because their semiconductors were full of them, and they hoped to find ways to make things work anyway.<p>I couldn't follow any of the other papers at the conference I was at, so I went for a walk, found a biology conference, and breezed in. An American woman was presenting results of applying a varying magnetic field to beetle larvae, leading them to grow 4x normal size. This kind of work was effectively forbidden in the US at the time, so results could only be presented at foreign conferences.<p>The official line in the US at the time, and in many parts still, was that the only possible way for EM fields to affect tissue was through heating. That assumption is written into numerous official standards and regulations. Cell phone radiation is still evaluated solely that way, carefully avoiding e.g. modulating the radiation, as would be needed to produce actually meaningful results. The valid experiment is performed on the general public, instead.<p>Robert Becker (of "The Body Electric") somehow got a free pass, working for the US Veterans Administration. They probably hoped he would discover how to stimulate regeneration of severed body parts. I have never found out who forbade such research or how they enforced it. I can guess the stricture had to do with preventing political interference with building high-tension transmission lines and maybe radars in populated areas, but that doesn't suggest how they enforced it.<p>Michael Levin has picked up and has extended Becker's work. And made absolutely astonishing YT vids about it.
I lived in Szeged for two years. Beautiful city and I have fond memories but it was a lonely existence there for me as an outsider - even speaking reasonable Hungarian after three years in Budapest. I do miss the Hungarian climate, the food and some of the people. If you go to Hungary, explore outside Budapest!
Related:<p><i>The Duties of John von Neumann’s Assistant in the 1930s (2020)</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26826261" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26826261</a> - April 2021 (60 comments)<p><i>The duties of John von Neumann's assistant (1993)</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16411799" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16411799</a> - Feb 2018 (66 comments)
von-Neumann, Stone, Rado... the names sure take me back to my own university days when I was closer to actual mathematics. Too bad this had no sketches!<p>I visited Szeged for the Computer Science Logic conference in 2006 and was quite taken with it - including the Stalinist-era university dorm architecture, and of course all of the paprika-industrial legacy.
I visited Szeged in the 1990s on a hiking trip. Sadly it doesn't have enough mountains for hiking, but luckily the Kétfarku Kutya Párt (Twotailed Dog Party) is campaigning to remedy this shortcoming! <a href="http://mkkp.hu/" rel="nofollow">http://mkkp.hu/</a>