Upon the initiative of the Hungarian UNESCO Committee, the Educational, Scientific and Cultural division of the General Assembly of the UNESCO dedicated the year 2012, the 100th from the birth of János Szentágothai, to the memory of the Hungarian professor of brain researches. The Hungarian Embassy in Amman organized a presentation by professor Balázs Gulyás in memory of the researcher between 4 and 8 December.

János Szentágothai (1912-1994)
János Szentágothai, descendent of Transylvanian Saxons on his father's side and Hungarians on his mother's side, was born on October 31, 1912 in Budapest. He graduated from the medical faculty of Péter Pázmány University of Sciences in 1936, and started his research career there. At the beginning of his university years he was an intern in the Department of Anatomy which at that time was headed by the renowned anatomist and neurologist Mihály Lenhossék.
He was appointed head of the Department of Anatomy at the University of Pécs in 1946. Due to a number of excellent appointed lecturers, the department became one of the most influential scientific workshops in the country in just a few short years. He surrounded himself with gifted students, creating a research atmosphere where originality and discovery flourished.
He returned to Budapest in 1963 and became head of the Institute of Anatomy of Semmelweis University, the place where he had once started his scientific career. He established new research trends and gathered a whole army of young scientists around him. His lectures in anatomy were sensational. "There was no other man in the world who could deliver such fascinating lectures of the driest subject in medical education", remembers neurobiologist Balázs Gulyás, a former disciple of Szentágothai's.
Using his silver stain and ingenuity Szentagothai provided unequivocal anatomical proof for the monosynaptic bi-neuronal reflex arc of the stretch reflex. With Gyorgy Szekely he transplanted eyes and limbs of newts to reveal how nerves regenerate to innervate them and in the process recognised the principle of neuronal self-organisation. With Bela Halasz, Bela Flerko and Bela Mess he discovered how the hypothalamic area of the brain governs the secretion of hormones from the pituitary gland which in turn govern our growth, sexual physiology, and response to stress. Some of his later discoveries, particularly in the neocortex and cerebellum, were produced by the same Golgi method (introduced by Camillo Golgi, an Italian histologist at the end of the last century) which is used to this day for visualising nerve cells.
In addition to being one of the leading and outstanding neuroscientists of the 20th century he was also an enthusiastic educator of generations of medical students. He delivered brilliant lectures in auditoria always full of students. He wrote an excellent textbook of functional anatomy and was the co-author of an anatomical atlas. His Atlas Anatomiae Corporis Humani, published with Professor Ferenc Kiss, has seen more than 82 editions and been translated into at least 13 languages including Chinese and Slovenian. He designed and drew much of the artwork for this fundamental book. He enjoyed painting and his papers are full of imaginative three-dimensional illustrations of his vision of the neuronal circuits. Some of his most important works are: Functional Anatomy. A textbook for medical students Budapest, Medicina (1971), Hypothalamic Control of the Anterior Pituitary. Budapest, Akadémiai Kiadó (1962), The Cerebellum as a Neuronal Machine. Berlin, Heidelberg, New York, Springer-Verlag (1967), Neural Organization: Structure, Function and Dynamics. The MIT Press, Cambridge London (1997) .
János Szentágothai became a corresponding member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1948, and was elected full member in 1967. He served as president of the Academy between 1977 and 1985, and was a parliamentarian between 1985 and 1994.
Szentágothai also created a Department of Anatomy of world repute at Semmelweis Medical School, Budapest. His impact on neuromorphology can be only compared to that of Santiago Ramón y Cajal, the Nobel laureate Spanish neuroscientist in the early decades of the 20th century. Szentágothai's extraordinary scientific achievements have been recognized by many academies and scientific societies all over the world, including, among others, the Finnish Academy, the National Academy of Sciences U.S.A., the Pontifical Academy Vatican, the Royal Norwegian and Swedish Academies, the Royal Society, London, the Soviet (All Union) and Medical Academies, which conferred on him honorary or foreign memberships. He was an Honorary Doctor of Oxford, Pécs and Turku Universities. He died on September 8, 1994 in Budapest.
Today, János Szentágothai's followers and disciples are to be found in several Hungarian and foreign universities and institutes. Two of the three winners of the prestigious Brain Prize given by the Danish “Grete Lundbeck European Brain Research Foundation” awarded for Hungarian neuroscientists the first time in 2011, are also Szentágothai-disciples: Tamás Freund and Péter Somogyi. 

Balázs Gulyás (1956 - )
Honorary member of Hungarian Academy of Sciences and professor of the Swedish Karolinska University, Balázs Gulyás was born in 1956 in Budapest, Hungary, and pursued his first university studies in medicine and physics at the universities Semmelweis and Eötvös Loránd in Budapest, followed by university studies in philosophy, law and neurobiology at the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium, where he obtained a PhD in neurosciences.
Gulyás made his post-doctoral training at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and at the University of Oxford. Since the late eighties he has been affiliated with Stockholm’s Karolinska Institute; here his main field of activity is related to functional and molecular neuroimaging. Nuclear medicine employs organic molecules marked with radioactive isotopes that are injected into the body. Scientists can then monitor how these tracking molecules are absorbed into various organs using a PET camera (positron emission tomography). They can, for example, visualize the transportation in the brain of dopamine and serotonin - neurotransmitters involved in diseases such as schizophrenia and Parkinson's disease. Balázs Gulyás studies a new type of biomarker that is used for disease diagnostics, development of new drugs, and studying treatment effects.
“In a special way János Szentágothai's personality unified the Aristotelian Triad: beauty, goodness and truth, i.e. an aspiration for aesthetics, morality and scientific truth.” This is how brain researcher and former disciple Balázs Gyulyás recalls the character of his former mentor and teacher.
In his presentation Balázs Gulyás will speak about the significance of Szentágothai’s works and its influence on the further researches of neuroscience including his own research career as well.
He is a member of the Academia Europaea and the Royal Belgian Academy of Medical Sciences. Balázs Gulyás is also the holder of the UNESCO Chair “Science and Society” at the Collegium Budapest – Institute for Advanced Study, Budapest, and a Faculty Member of the Parmenides Foundation for Thinking, Munich. Among other activities, he is the founding director of the World Science Forum (WSF) series. On this occasion he is going to deepen the relations with the Jordanian scientific representatives to discuss about Jordan as a possible location of one of the following World Science Forums.
Gulyás has published nine books and over 200 papers in scientific journals in the fields of neurosciences.
Some of his works:
-Gulyás, B. (ed.) The Brain-Mind Problem. Philosophical and Neurophysiological Approaches. Leuven and Assen: Leuven University Press and Van Gorcum, 1987.
-Gulyás, B., Ottoson, D., and Roland, P. E. (eds.) Functional Organization of the Human Visual Cortex. Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1993.
- Gulyás, B. and Müller-Gärtner, H. W. (eds.) Positron emission tomography: A critical assessment of recent trends. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publisher, 1998.
- Pléh, C., Kovács, G. and Gulyás, B. (eds.) Cognitive Neuroscience. Budapest, Osiris Press, 2003.
 - Kraft, E., Gulyás, B. and Pöppel, E. (eds.) Neural Correlates of Thinking. Springer Verlag, 2008.

Pictures of the professor's visit in the Al-Khalidi Medical Center and his presentation: