– The wife of the first Hungarian prime minister was born into a noble family. What was the intellectual heritage that Count Antonia Zichy brought to her marriage?

- His father, Count Károly Zichy, was an imperial chamberlain and deputy chief bailiff of Vas county. He did a lot of charity work, supported the sick and the poor, introduced the Hungarian administration on his estates and founded a Hungarian school. He had eight children by his wife, Count Antonia Batthyány.

The young Antonia inherited not only wealth from her parents, but also helpfulness, deep religiousness and national commitment. She was nine years old when her mother died, but the young countess kept the words of the will of her mother throughout her life: "it is in the performance of duty that man finds true satisfaction".

- Antonia was a third cousin of Lajos Batthyány. Was theirs a marriage of love, or was it a combination of the customs and constraints of the time?

- It was a fiery, fast-moving love. In December 1833, the seventeen-year-old young girl met her distant relative, third cousin, Count Lajos Batthyány, almost ten years older than her, at a party in Pozsony. Batthyány was on his way to Turkey, but love overrode his journey, and eight days later he proposed to her, and a year later he led her to the altar in St. Martin's Cathedral in Pozsony.

The couple then travelled to Italy, Switzerland, France and Bavaria. In Paris, while Batthyány, a lawyer by training, spent his time listening to prosecutions in the French courts, his young wife could not get enough of French fashion, buying everything, admiring the hairstyles, hats, expensive fabrics and artificial flowers, which were still a novelty at the time. In the years that followed, they travelled extensively, travelling all over Europe together. Years later, the imprisoned Batthyány said to his wife, as a farewell, that she should remember him by the first years of their marriage.

-Children were not absent from their lives: one by one, they were born. What do we know about what kind of mother and father they were? What was the parent-child relationship like in a family of the aristocracy at that time?

-They had three daughters, but only two survived to adulthood - Emilia and Ilona, and little Antonia died at the age of two. Their first son, Ákos, also died unexpectedly in 1845 at two months old, a loss that was particularly hard on the father. "Lajos Batthyány wants to go mad, he can't take any action, he doesn't want to hear about anything, he is wallowing on the floor", wrote his friend Count István Széchenyi in his diary. Two years later, Antonia again gave her husband a son. Elemér lived a long life, dying in 1932.

Even if the parent-child relationship was not as intimate as it is today, the wife's letters show that the count and his wife took the upbringing of their children seriously and cared deeply about their fate.

-What was life like for the couple before the 1848 Revolution?

- The family spent most of their time in Ikervár, Vas county, and in the mid-1840s the castle was renovated according to the plans of Miklós Ybl. Mrs Batthyány created a real fairy garden with a beautiful park, special flowers and ponds, as well as musical and literary afternoons and evening balls. Guests stayed here often and with pleasure, enjoying the Count's precious library and his exceptional wine collection.

In the winter, they regularly hosted parties in their rented apartment in Pest, where not only aristocrats attended. They also enjoyed going to the theatre and had a box subscription.

Image

Countess Antónia Zichy, wife of Count Lajos Batthyány - Drawing by Miklós Barabás

- Great love, fruitful marriage, exemplary social life. Was Antonia Zichy and Lajos Batthyány's relationship so ideal?

- Not quite. We respect our first Prime Minister as a great patriot and an excellent Hungarian, but he was also a fallible man, with mistakes, errors and internal dramas. Many of his contemporaries already knew that the Count had an affair with his sister-in-law, his wife's sister Karolina, wife of Count György Károlyi. His farewell letter to his wife reveals to us the remorse that plagued Batthyány "In these lines I repeat to you the deeply felt expression of my fervent gratitude and admiration for all the treasures of your pure love, which I have never been able to deserve; and as true as it is that I stand at the threshold of death, it is only the knowledge of this sin that I take with me to the grave."

Despite the pain and disappointment of marital infidelity, Antonia remained a loyal companion and protector of the Count, and was , as Batthyány himself put it, "always a good angel" - in times of good fortune and in times of trial.

- How interested was Antonia Zichy in public affairs? How involved was she in her husband's work, and in a male-dominated world, was there any way she could be?

The Countess not only provided him a background in their private life, but also shaped her husband's political views. Her national commitment, her world view and her knowledge of languages (Hungarian, German, French, English) had a great influence on the Count, who spoke Hungarian poorly when they met. According to his contemporaries, his wife encouraged him to take a more active, reformist role.

In 1839 Batthyány began to engage in public politics, and already in his first manifesto he emphasised: “The encouragement of womanhood has been found to be an effective means of arousing patriotism in all endangered nations; that it may assume this glorious role in our country as soon as possible, we shall endeavour.”

In addition to her family duties, the young wife became her husband's political partner, a worthy representative of opposition principles. She was a spectacular advocate of her husband's political views in parliaments as well as in the theatre and at balls. She supported economic initiatives in Hungary, regularly donated to charitable causes, and in the 1940s her salon in Pest became a centre of social life, where Mihály Vörösmarty, for example, often visited.

Together with his sister, the wife of Count György Károlyi, they were also enthusiastic supporters of the Védegylet (Protection Association). They spoke Hungarian, wore Hungarian clothes made in Hungary and danced to Hungarian music at balls. They were adored by the youth, and their personalities amazed even Sándor Petőfi, who disliked aristocrats, calling the countesses "fairy flowers".

According to secret police informers' reports, the two did more to strengthen national feeling than a parliament, because fashion has more power than legal disputes.

-She was the first First Lady in Hungarian history. How did she shape this role, how active was she in that role?

- She did not have much opportunity to appear as a classical First Lady, as the development of the revolution did not allow her to do so. At the same time, her life before Batthyány became Prime Minister and her behaviour after her husband's execution portray her as a virtuous, powerful woman of great influence, who not only offered the warmth of home to a statesman but also shaped our history - she influenced the Count and shaped public opinion with her behaviour and gestures. One thing is for sure, she set the bar high for all the wives of prime ministers to come.

- What did she think of the outcome in January 1849, after her husband was taken prisoner in Austria? Was she aware of the fate of the first prime minister?

-She did her best to prevent the inevitable. She followed her prisoner husband wherever she was allowed to go, writing letters of comfort and encouragement and praying for a better fate for them. She tried her best to plead for an appeal for pardon, but she could not help.

Image

Portrait of Countess Antónia Zichy, widow of Prime Minister Count Lajos Batthyány – engraving by Károly Rusz

- It is true that to avoid the humiliation of hanging, she herself brought that particular dagger into the prison?

-Yes. At the Count's request, she carried to the cell the dagger with which her husband wounded his neck the following night to avoid the humiliation of hanging. We can only imagine the agony the wife went through fearing that her husband might commit suicide with the instrument she had given him. The widow was to be prosecuted, but it was not successfully proven that she had smuggled the dagger in. In his last letter, Batthyány, in an attempt to save his wife, cast suspicion on himself saying: 'I have long carried a rescue instrument'.

– What happened to the widow and her family after that fatal day of 6 October?

- Batthyány's property was also confiscated, so her only legacy was her husband's letter of farewell. Mrs Batthyány and her children moved abroad to escape the harassment, their livelihood being provided for by the considerable Zichy fortune. She first went to Bavaria to stay with her sister-in-law, then to Paris, and finally settled near Zurich.

The Austrian secret police kept a constant watch on her, as her house was regularly visited by the leading figures of the Hungarian emigration, most prominently Count László Teleki. The Countess did not interfere in the politics of the emigration, but she regularly helped impoverished fugitives.

"Although we live abroad, we always ponder over our sad memories in our sweet homeland," she wrote about her feelings in a letter.

She moved home in 1856 because she wanted to marry her children at home, and she managed to marry her daughters to descendants of Hungarian families, and their weddings were national events. She bought a small castle in Dáka, where prominent public figures often visited 'the most honoured daughter of the country'.

-What was her behaviour like in these difficult times?

- First of all, she insisted on her husband's will and did not ask for anything back from the Austrian state. Bearing the weight of her widowhood, she was respected and loved not only for her loyalty to her husband but also for her own example, charity and patriotism. Together with János Damjanich's widow, Emilia Csernovich, she founded the Hungarian Housekeepers’ Association. Together with the wives of the martyrs of Arad, she had a requiem said on 6 October each year.

Wherever she appeared, it was considered a protest against authoritarianism, and the widow of the martyred prime minister was often cheered.

An important event was the reburial of her husband in 1870, where she was finally able to pay her last respects to his body, which had been hidden in the Franciscan crypt until then. She wore a black mourning dress for the rest of her life, and signed her letters "Widow of Count Lajos Batthyány".

-Antonia Zichy survived the Compromise by eleven years. How did she relate to the new era? Can one whose husband has been executed compromise with the ones in power?

- The Countess did not agree with the Compromise: 'Hungary is needed for the monarchy to exist, it is true, but Hungary can live without Austria, that is my conviction. We have the strength, Austria is the rotten body, and if we lean on it, we will fall down, too," she wrote. On the eve of the coronation, hers was the only house in Pest whose windows were not lightened up.

The political atmosphere of dualism was no longer her world, since Franz Joseph, the tyrant, became king of the country: 'my sad voice is not welcome, for it sounds like a reproach'. In the remaining years of her life, she lived in seclusion, caring for her children and grandchildren and doing much charity work. She died on 29 September 1888.

In accordance with her wishes, as written in her will, she was buried beside her husband and the letter of farewell he had left her was placed on her heart.

- You mentioned in a conversation that the public is, unfortunately, a good ten to fifteen years behind in terms of what is considered genetically modified. Let's start then by explaining what we mean by GMOs in the 21st century.

- People are as distrustful of GMOs as they were of mobile phones. A few decades ago, of course, genetic modification worked differently. Perhaps the best way to imagine its evolution is to compare it to fixing a broken kitchen cupboard. Whereas in the old days, if a cupboard door was broken, you had to buy another cupboard to replace it, today, if you have the same problem, you only have to replace the screw that caused the problem. I can understand why fifteen years ago people were terrified of genetic engineering, but nowadays it is more like genetic engineering than genetic modification. We can now achieve the desired change not only by introducing an external gene into the organism but also by tweaking the regulatory region of the genes in the plant. In other words, we are fine-tuning.

- What is the purpose of genetic modification in plants today?

- We produce such plants for several purposes. One version is when we genetically modify the plant to make it more resistant to various diseases, insects, pests so that ultimately fewer pesticides need to be used in its cultivation. Another genetic modification technique, often used, is to make the plant more resistant to the active ingredient of a spray. This method is used so that the useful grain that is sown can be easily sorted out from the various weeds and plants, as the agent kills the weed, but the valuable grain is unharmed by the genetic modification, so the end result is a much cleaner crop. In these cases, low environmental impact sprays are always used today.

Perhaps these examples already illustrate one of the benefits of genetic modification: it reduces the use of chemicals.

- As far as I know, feed imported from abroad by livestock breeders is not controlled, so it may contain GMO products. So a chicken breast may get a GMO-free label in the shop because it is a conventional chicken raised on Hungarian feed. But how verifiable do you think this is?

- It always makes me think about how "organic" bananas from Colombia, the home of the drug lords, can be. I wonder how much it costs there to buy a label like that and put it on a banana? Who can check it several continents away? One thing is for sure: I, who am familiar with these technologies, would never buy meat more expensive just because it is GMO-free. And it is important to emphasize once again that if a piece of meat is GMO-free it means that it is not organic because it may require more chemicals to treat it and it may have higher technical costs. And let's not deny the marketing value of the label: because GMO has become a pejorative term in the public consciousness, the GMO-free label has a good ring in the market. It is as if it was an adjective for the quality of meat, however, the meat itself can still be bad, label notwithstanding.

- Why aren't researchers like you lobbying to whitewash the term GMO?

- Genetic modification can be used to do a lot of good things, but because it is also done by humans, it is inevitably sometimes used for pointless or harmful purposes. Fifty years from now, there are likely to be private reproductive clinics where people go because they want glow-in-the-dark body parts. We can't do anything about stupid or self-interested people, but for the moment we researchers need to concentrate on how we can turn this knowledge to the benefit of humanity. In many cases, this is controlled breeding, which can achieve useful goals in five to ten years that would take decades using conventional methods.

We can hate GMOs, it is just important that we put the energy and attention into it so that we know exactly what we hate.

- Will we get to the point where we can eat better quality food thanks to genetic modification?

- Such attempts have been made and are still being made: the best known is the story of the so-called golden rice. In the Far East, many problems are caused by vitamin A deficiency, which in severe cases can lead to childhood blindness. Twenty years ago, researchers Peter Beyer and Ingo Potrykus used what was then considered a conventional genetic modification to 'breed' rice that produces beta-carotene, which gives it a slightly yellower colour - hence the name golden rice. It has no resistance to any pesticides, it is only considered genetically modified because it contains this extra substance that prevents the development of this typical deficiency disease, thus saving lives. At the time, the scientists who created the gold rice were driven by humanitarian concerns and gave up their copyright and patent rights. Unfortunately, however, gold rice has not been commercialized since then because it has been so fiercely opposed by various environmental lobby organisations that they have won the day - at the expense of the masses. Of course, we in the West may have unrealistic fears about genetic pollution, since we live in a place where vitamin A deficiency is a rarity, because carrots, spinach, and Brussels sprouts are among the foods we eat every day. But no one in the Philippines or Vietnam has asked people about this. In 2019, the Philippines finally allowed the public cultivation of golden rice.

Image

Photo: ODPictures Art Studio

- But you're not genetically modifying plants, you're genetically modifying animals for a noble cause. Can you tell us about that?

- Of course! In my PhD project with the University of Szeged Medical School, we studied drugs that cause sudden cardiac death in animal experiments. As a PhD student at the well-remembered Institute of Agricultural Biotechnology, with a research group led by Dr Zsuzsanna Bősze, I contributed to this by creating a rabbit whose heart was engineered to produce a human ion channel protein.

The rabbit is a very good electrophysiological model, because its heart size and heart rhythm are the closest to those of humans among small animals.

In case of laboratory animals, it is important that they should be easy to keep, and that is why most of these experiments are done on mice, but the mouse heart is very different from the human heart in terms of electrophysiological properties. In the rabbit heart, thanks to our genetic modification, a human protein was produced alongside its own, so that human drugs could bind to this human protein, giving much more accurate clinical results. It was really complete research because we developed the animal and there was someone who was able to examine it immediately – the process did not die along its course but became practice-oriented.

- Yes, here genetic modification is taking place at quite different levels and for important causes.

- I wanted to choose a research topic that made sense, and these rabbits and our results are still being used and studied in Europe today. Sudden cardiac death often has no symptoms, or more precisely no identifiable symptoms, which is why it can happen that athletes who have undergone regular medical check-ups suddenly collapse and die on the field without any warning. Doctors cannot examine or reconstruct the events afterwards, because unfortunately the heart is no longer working, and the only way to find out whether the person had a gene mutation/defect that could have such drastic consequences is to check their DNA. So we have basically reproduced this gene defect in an animal and from then on we could continuously monitor the minimal abnormalities that can be detected in the heart. That is how different types of drugs were tested, because the other difficulty with this condition is that it is not only cardiac drugs that can cause this effect, but also certain antidepressants, anti-inflammatory drugs.

- Let's also reassure animal rights activists that you value the animals used in your experiments.

- Yes, obviously because they are very valuable, very important. The animal welfare standards are based on the 3Rs principle, to which another one has been added to in recent years. So the four R's are reduction, refinement, replacement and rehabilitation, which must be respected in all experiments. Reduction involves reducing the number of animals used in experiments as much as possible. Refinement means using methods that cause the animal as little suffering and pain as possible during the experiment, breeding and care. Replacement means that, where possible, instead of animal testing, a scientifically accepted method or test should be used that does not require the use of live animals. The fourth, rehabilitation, draws attention to the moral responsibility of all researchers in the aftercare and rehabilitation of animals used in experiments. Any experiment that causes more pain to the animal than a needle stick must obtain an animal protection permit. The ethical aspect of all animal experiments is crucial: we must demonstrate the purpose for which we want to carry them out.

Obviously, someone who wanted to use the results for entertainment purposes would not get a licence if the aim was to produce, say, a faster greyhound or a lighting horse.

But if we use it for purposes such as producing golden rice or medicine, or perhaps developing agricultural products, then perhaps it is more understandable for the readers why one can love biotechnology so much.

Image

Photo: ODPictures Art Studio

- How much buzz is there in experiments around the world? Can Hungary keep up with the Western world? Or is it in the Far East that the latest technological innovations are being born?

- Scientists differentiate 16 different types of sudden cardiac death syndrome, and in 2013, we developed type 5, meaning we developed a rabbit that is apt to examine sudden cardiac death type 5. We met a Chinese researcher at a conference years later, and we were very happy when he told us that they too were developing this particular type of rabbit. We asked him which type of syndrome they were modelling and he said, with the utmost naturalness: all of them! This is a good example of the different possibilities we have. Obviously we cannot and should not compete with them.

- What does the future hold? Will we be less afraid of genetic modification? I hope that those who read this interview will...

- We are moving towards more and more gentle regulation. Already, there are treatments for plants that only make the leaves genetically more resistant to pests, and does not affect the crops, as pests leave that alone, too, and humans only eat the that part.  In case of farm livestock, it is now feasible to introduce a regulatory region into the animal which, once the animal is ready for slaughter, turns off the gene that was producing the protein that helps it grow. After the 'switch-off', these animals are kept for an additional month and when they are used as cooking material, they no longer contain any of the protein produced by the modified gene.

Our bunny was of the kind that only produced the human protein in its heart chamber, not in the whole bunny. It is even possible to assign a certain substance not to be produced in embryo phase but be produced in adolescence.

So, science is capable of more than we think, and is smarter with its power than we first think. It may be feared, but it is no more dangerous than any of the two-edged tools God has given to mankind.

Tamás Bakócz was born in 1442 in Erdőd in Eastern Hungary, in a serf family. His father was a wheel-making craftsman, who was able to educate his sons with church support. Bakócz did not later deny his lowly origins, as he added wagon wheels to his coat of arms. His brother, Bálint, won a benefice as a young man so that he could help his younger brother, who had entered the Dominican Order, to study. Bakócz, or Tamás Erdődi as he appears in the school registers, was a schoolboy in Szatmár and completed his studies at the Breslau and Padua studium generale. In 1464 he became a Master of Philosophy at the University of Krakow, where many Hungarian students attended and spent the following years at the University of Ferrara in Italy. After returning home in 1470, he was appointed to the royal chancellery as a clerk. His career took off from 1480. It was then that his brother gave him the provostship in Titel, and after giving advice to King Matthias during his western campaign, the king took notice of his talents and made him his secretary. He was subsequently appointed royal adviser and vice-chancellor, and in 1486, again by the Emperor's favour, he was awarded the bishopric of Győr.

He accompanied the King on his campaigns, managed the diplomatic affairs of the country, and was part of the Renaissance spirit that permeated King Matthias' court after his marriage to Beatrix of Aragon, Princess of Naples.

When the king died in 1490, Bakócz, after some vacillation, helped to elect the Polish king, Wladyslaw II, and in international politics, he championed the cause of the great war against the Turks, which meant that he also supported the ambitions of the Republic of Venice, which was interested in the same.

Properties, titles, connections

In 1490, the year Wladyslaw II ascended to the throne, he appointed the forty-eight-year-old Bakócz, who was by then one of the richest and most influential people in the country, as chancellor-general. His accumulation of wealth was an eyesore to many. Those envious of him had him described as the country's 'most unscrupulous orphan' since many of his estates were acquired by adoption or by inheritance contract.  In 1497 he exchanged the bishopric of Győr for the more important and wealthier bishopric of Eger, but he still possessed many other ecclesiastical titles and estates. In the same year, with the approval of the Emperor and the Pope, he exchanged the bishopric of Eger for the archbishopric of Esztergom, previously held by the young Hippolito d'Este, nephew of Queen Beatrice, the widow of King Matthias. With this exchange, Bakócz became the head of the Hungarian Church. In 1500, as a Hungarian archbishop with the support of Venice, he was granted the title of cardinal by Pope Alexander VI.

He was also highly respected in Rome: he was regarded as an influential high priest, a supporter of European unity against the Turks, a true Renaissance lord.

In 1510, Pope Gregory II made him Patriarch Emeritus of Constantinople. It was a mere title since Constantinople had been under Turkish rule for almost a century, but its holder was among the most prestigious of the cardinals. At home, alongside the weak-handed king Wladyslaw II, Bakócz ruled the country's affairs with almost absolute power after 1500. The great chance of the life of the cardinal who was already in his seventies came in 1513, after the death of Pope Julius II.

The candidate for the papacy

He arrived in Rome for the conclave with great pomp and splendour, as the heir-apparent to the papal throne. But the cardinals, who were mostly from Italy, had no interest in electing a cardinal who intended to use the authority and wealth of the Church to launch a war against the Turks, defend the southern Hungarian frontiers, reconquer the Balkans and Constantinople, and expel the Turks from Europe. This decided the fate of Bakócz. The Italian cardinals were more interested in the peace of Italy, in preserving the Renaissance splendour of the Curia and in winning over the Medici family than in risky and expensive campaigns in the Balkans.

Thus, although Bakócz initially received votes, the majority voted for an Italian candidate, the still young Cardinal Giovanni de' Medici of Florence, in his late thirties, who chose the name, Leo X. The new Pope, who was the son of the legendary Renaissance prince of Florence, Lorenzo de' Medici, felt he had to make amends to his losing opponent, Bakócz, who had left the conclave in defeat. So he sent the Archbishop of Esztergom home with an appointment as papal legate and the authority to declare a crusade. On his return to Hungary, the Cardinal did indeed declare a crusade, but in 1514 the disobedient serfs gathered under the sign of the cross, led by a Szekler nobleman named György Dózsa, turned against their own masters instead of the Turks.

Image

Coat of arms of Tamás Bakócz. Image: Wikimedia

The Hungarian notables managed to quell the bloody peasant war that broke out only with brutal severity, and the Archbishop subsequently received many untruthful reproaches from them for letting the spirit of rebellion out of the bottle.

He must also have taken it as a personal insult that the noblemen of the Parliament, in their anger, decided that in the future no descendant of the serfs could be appointed a bishop or archbishop.

The Crusade was dropped from the agenda, and a decade later, in 1526, a weakened and abandoned Hungary suffered a fatal defeat at Mohács from the hands of the Sultan. Tamás Bakócz did not live to see this tragedy, suffering a stroke in 1519. He retired to Esztergom, where he died in 1521, aged seventy-nine. Here he was laid to rest in the red marble Bakócz Chapel of the Cathedral, the finest work of his Renaissance artistic patronage, built with Italian masters and one of the jewels of the Hungarian Renaissance.

Bakócz was a child of his time: a Renaissance high priest who loved power and pomp, who raised his family from the serfs to the Hungarian aristocracy, and did his best to unite Europe against the Turkish conquest and to save the country. Until the end of the 20th century, he was the only Hungarian mentioned by his contemporaries as a contender for the papal throne.

- Cetbiology - what attracted you to this profession? And what fascinates you about these huge animals?

- What you just said, their size. But it's very difficult to sum up what I love about them because it's all a feeling that I've probably never been able to put into words exactly. As a child, I was very attracted to whale films like Free Willy or National Geographic episodes, but at that time there was no scientific motivation behind my interest. I attended the Hungarian Dance Academy for a while, and then rode competitively, but all the while I kept thinking that it would be worthwhile to look into ways of getting closer to the animals I admired. Luckily, my sister and mum were supportive - in my house, everyone does what they love, everyone goes after their dreams.

- You were admitted to the Department of Zoology and Ecology at the Faculty of Natural Sciences of ELTE. What was your path to marine biology?

- At ELTE, you had to pass everything from analytical chemistry to nature conservation to get a degree in biology. During those years, I tried to make contacts that brought me closer to my whale research - some people advised me to volunteer with a cetacean research group abroad. So I did, but in the process, I was faced with the fact that someone with an unusual interest like mine has to pay for almost everything themselves, even if they only volunteer. I've also volunteered at marine mammal conferences (European, Cetacean Society annual conferences) - this has helped me tremendously in networking. I later realised also that cetacean research is a hugely underfunded profession, even though there is a lot to be done because we have very limited, almost minimal knowledge about cetaceans at the moment.

One or two species can stay underwater for several hours, which is why it is difficult to get information about them. The ocean may be full of species we don't even know about.

After graduating from ELTE, I started studying marine biology at the University of Groningen. I could have chosen a more exotic location, but my financial means allowed me to go to this school. Here I had the opportunity to participate in a research project on cetogenetics in Canada. It was the first time I had seen a whale up close. I just stood on the boat in St. Lawrence Bay and watched all the huge animals swimming around me. It was fantastic! After graduating from Groningen, I applied for a PhD at the University of Copenhagen, where I currently live and teach as a teaching assistant and as a supervisor for a student. As far as research is concerned, life is a bit stagnant at the moment, research is also stagnant because of the pandemic.

- What is your research area?

- Environmental DNA, also known as eDNA. In a nutshell, this means that we get genetic information about the cetaceans from water, so we don't have to take small pieces of them out. Water contains, among other things, cetacean epithelium; it's like when our skin's epithelium is left on a towel or a cloth.

Image

Dóra Székely

- You must have had many ’ah-ha moments’ during your studies and fieldwork. Can you give us some examples?

- When you read stories and studies, you think it's not that hard to research the cetaceans. That's what I thought too, at the beginning. But in fact every aspect of it is challenging. Sometimes you have to wait weeks until the conditions are right to get out on the water. You have to be physically fit to ride the swell for 10-12 hours, and still focus on cetaceans and sampling. Samples have to be transported, processed in a lab (where many errors can be made), data analysed using various bioinformatics methods, and then a publication written in a clear and understandable way.

So you have to be a biologist, a boat captain, an athlete, a lab technician, a bioinformatician, a graphic designer at the same time, let alone a writer of course, because it's all pointless if you can't communicate your results to the public or to the professionals.

By the way, when I first went to a marine mammal conference and found out that this profession attracts people who are typically open-minded, enthusiastic and passionate about nature and the sea, I finally felt that I was not alone in this passion and that no one was looking at me strangely. It was an important milestone.

Then I was quite surprised how well you can approach certain whales by boat, because they aren’t scared off at all - although blue whales are very scared despite their huge size. We usually take biopsies and other samples at these times, and most of the time they don't mind, they tolerate it well.

I also gained important experience when we tried to collect samples in northern Norway on a whale-watching tour boat, and I experienced for the first time what a "whale watching season" is all about. There were as many as four or five boats to watch a group of killer whales from, large and small (add to that those who paid to swim with them), and these smaller boats sometimes had to manoeuvre very quickly around the dolphins to find the moment when they could get close enough for people to jump in the water with them. I naively thought that strict rules had to be followed to do these activities, but I was wrong.

Image

Dóra Székely

- What are the main environmental threats to cetaceans today?

- One of them is the noise, I could say that where there is intensive shipping the cetaceans live in constant noise. In certain areas killer whales have been forced to communicate with each other at much higher frequencies than usual. They raise their voice over the noise of the sea to hear each other. There is also chemical pollution, whaling, cetacean collisions with larger vessels, plastic waste, tourism, but also industrial fishing, which not only overfishes the fish, but unfortunately also catches cetaceans quite often with huge trawls. This has brought many species to the edge of extinction.

- Has the shutdown due to the coronavirus outbreak brought any cleansing to the whales' habitat?

- There have been many reports that some species, including dolphins, have started to liven up with clearer waters, less noise and the fact that tourism has slowed down a bit. It would be good to study exactly what effects the shutdown had on cetaceans, but as I said, many research groups, including the one I was working with, have been stopped because of the epidemic. This has not happened for twenty years.

– You talk about your profession with great enthusiasm, your eyes sparkle when you talk about whales. But have you ever been discouraged? I mean, was there a point in your career when you had doubts about whether the path you were on was really for you?

– I never wavered, I would rather say that my journey was not exactly unobstructed. I was lucky because after my master's degree I managed to get a PhD - my research topic is environmental DNA - but the period in between was quite "painful", I delivered food, washed dishes in restaurants, and sold clothes in a fashion shop.

Unfortunately, completing my PhD is no guarantee of anything. I don't know if I'll have a job. In any case, I'm optimistic, because it's impossible that all the energy I've invested won't pay off!

I will be submitting a number of research funding applications in the near future, and if all goes well, I will be able to visit Greenland in May this year.

– When we were looking for an appointment, I had a glance into a very strict schedule for a moment. What I liked best was "I usually meet people after two". This strict schedule is obviously important for efficient work. Is it also good for your private life?

-I try to organise most of my work so that the structure gives me the direction I need. Health, for example, depends a lot on what you eat and how much exercise you do. I like walking, so we don't have a car and I've arranged my life so that I walk everywhere, it's my sport, I don't go to the gym. I live an hour from work in Boston, I walk to work every day. We don't think it's right to drive everywhere, so we don't have a car. We use a bicycle, or we get a taxi or a community car if we really have to, this is how we went on holiday, too. Or we feel that television is harmful, so we don't have a television.

The best motivation is to create a framework where things that we think are not healthy do not fit in.

– While walking to work are you just looking at the world or are you thinking about current projects?

- I'm on the phone. I usually call my mother in Transylvania, my friends and sometimes I have professional meetings.

- Do you talk to your mother about your research?

- Sometimes she sees it on Facebook and asks me if she got it right, but otherwise rarely.

– Is there an objective indicator of when it is worth accepting an invitation to travel to a meeting?

- It was about 15 years ago when I first felt that there were too many invitations and not enough time to fulfil them. My New Year's resolution then was that I would only take on such a task if I thought someone would remember it in five years' time.

- Which moment do you think was the biggest flash of your life? Maybe not necessarily the biggest success for you, but the one that resulted in the biggest change in the world?

- When I realized in New York City that I should be dealing with networks. I didn't understand it at the time, I just felt that it would define the next 25 years, maybe even the next 250 years. At that time, network thinking was neither in the academic canon nor in the public discourse, if you googled the word ‘network’, only the television channel would come up. The decision to put everything aside and start dealing with that was the biggest decision of my life, and the discoveries that followed all resulted from that.

- Was it that you made a decision and the next day you started? Or had you been flirting with dealing networks as a hobby for a long time?

- The idea came in 1994, but it was only in '99, five years later, that my first known publication came out on it. Back then my lab was doing everything else, mainly materials science. In 1999 I walked into my lab and said, from tomorrow, no more materials science here.

Those around me did not understand, especially that I went so far as to return the grant money to those who did not want to support the new theme, even though it was very difficult to get support at the time.

- And then from a physicist the network scientist was born and network research itself, which today has a department...

- I saw that anything I could come up with in the field of materials science would be dwarfed by anything I might one day show in the field of network science. But to this day, I'm still basically a physicist, and I work in the physics department.

- Network research is revolutionising the toolbox of an incredible range of disciplines, from physics and mathematics to computer science, history, economics, biology and sociology. And you're getting into all of them. But it's not like you to stay in one field for too long...

- Many people say that courtship, the unfulfilled relationship, is the most exciting. In science, that's true. The more I know about a subject, the less curious I am and the less creative I am. So every five or six years we change subjects quite drastically. It also means completely shutting down what we were doing before to have energy for the new topic. Such a change also completely transforms the membership of our lab. For example, the topic of my book "Bursts" was human movement, but now there is no one in the lab who deals with that. I work in an educational institute, and the people I work with come here to learn and train, so if I change the topic, I finish what we started with the old people, but I direct the new ones to the new research area.

- Is it so easy to let go of a research project after a big realisation?

- Although the science is cumulative, raising a question matters a lot. That's why the person who formulates the paradigm in a field plays a very important role, and although many people are still working on relativity, for example, everyone thinks of Einstein, who gave the first, decisive impetus to the subject. I want to get rid of the idea that I have to be everywhere, and the best way to do that is to let go.

Image

Photo:László Emmer

- Your research is based on the assumption that the different units and areas of the world are ultimately structured according to similar movements, systems and networks. Where does this conviction come from?

- I am a physicist, I think in terms of laws. I believe that this glass falls for the same reason here as it does at your home, or for the same reason why the moon does not leave the earth. In physics, the belief that laws govern the world is based on vast empirical experience.

- But that human relationships are governed by the same laws seems to be a bold idea...

- Not quite. First Newton then Descartes and others developed the philosophy that the whole world is determined and that everything can be predicted from atoms. They were wrong about that, but the fascinating question is why quantum mechanics cannot predict human behaviour. We see that there are different levels of organisation and it is very difficult to move from one level to another. Of course, you can use atoms to understand molecular organisation; you can use molecules to understand chemical reactions; you can use chemical reactions to understand metabolism; you can use the metabolic web to understand cell behaviour; and thinking about the cell can take you to the living world and from there, through several further steps, to society. What is not possible is to use quantum mechanics to address social questions. The levels of organisation cannot be transcended. The more elementary the level, the more precise the laws, however the higher the level, the greater is the role of chance.

At the social level, the laws are so noisy that we tend to question their existence.

- This reminds me of the surprising historical thread in "Bursts", with which you tease the reader a bit. Is history so important to you because your father is a historian?

- As a minority Transylvanian, history was a vital issue for us. We did not regard it as a school subject, because the subject ’History’ was the history of Romania, and we had emotional ties to Hungarian history. This forbidden nature made it more valuable.

- At the end of "Bursts" you write that you had been writing this book for many years, and it was finished despite the fact that you had a bicycle accident, and had your children. Are personal life and work so much at odds?

- No one has more than 24 hours. Even I can't work 24 hours, and I couldn't deal with family matters for 24 hours, either. We need diversity in life, which is reflected in the quality and quantity of relationships. On the other hand, I can stay in one subject for a certain amount of time, and if I don't change, my brain goes out. If this happens at work, it's best to have dinner, talk about something else, and then in the morning I find myself going back to whatever I was firing my brain at.

- It is common for you to say "now it's family time", this is holiday, not research? For example, you've just come from holiday.

- Of course. But on holiday, the family gets up at 10 or 11, and I get up at six, so I have four or five hours every morning. I close the door quietly behind me and by the time they wake up, I feel like I've achieved something that day.

- You use the word Providence in your book, albeit with a small initial. Do you wonder whether the world is a created world or whether it just came into being?

- I am basically a researcher and I like to look at data. But religion is about the inner world and balance of the individual, it can play a very important role in preserving it, and it can also be an important social organising force - it played a vital, culture-saving role in the Hungarian minority communities of Transylvania during communism. However, understanding the world does not necessarily require a creation myth. My wife is a theologian, and it is thanks to her that I have come to understand how narrow the image of church and religion that has been ingrained in us in Transylvania and perhaps in Hungary can be, and how much richer the religious experience can be, and in fact how sophisticated the concept of faith is.

It is certainly closely related to love, and if I look at it that way, I am religious in that sense.

- The eternal dilemma for scientists is to what extent they are responsible for the future application of their discoveries. What do you think?

- Every scientific result has negative and positive consequences. Should curing cancer be called to an end because the science behind chemotherapy could be used to construct an atomic bomb? No, it should not. Because progress is not driven by geniuses, but discoveries are made because the time is right. If I keep quiet, someone else will do it for me. Gravity existed before Newton, if he had not written about it, someone else would have discovered it. In addition, the scientist has a huge responsibility: to communicate clearly, not to keep facts secret, to make them public and, where necessary, to draw society's attention to the negative effects. But how society reacts to this often depends on the social context and politics. During the Covid epidemic we saw how little influence scientists have on decision-makers in some countries. We can give advice, but it depends on the leadership whether politicians are willing to listen and move in the right direction. But in a democracy there are rules of the game on how to get information to society. It is our duty to participate in this process.

- In this Network research can help a lot, too, because you have researches that deal with the spread of information.

- Exactly, and we can see that there are countries - New Zealand, for example, and many European countries, including Hungary - that listen to scientists, who have done what they had to do, and thanks to that we can now (in August) talk in Hungary without masks. I very much hope that this will also be the case in November. But we would not be able to meet in person in America now, because the United States and Brazil have completely ignored the scientific consensus on the virus.

- Your latest research is on health and nutrition. Has the study of epidemics brought you to this area?

- Oh, no, I've been doing this for a long time, one of my jobs is at Harvard Medical School, where we've been trying to develop drugs using network research methods for about ten plus years. From that grew nutrition research. I was forced to realize that everything we do is based on genetics, but genetics only gives us 10-20 percent predictability. So, if I know your whole genome, I have roughly a 10-20 percent chance of predicting whether you'll get heart disease. So where is the missing 80-90 percent? In environmental influences. In exercise, air quality, and but mainly in diet.

So we started to look at how we could observe the effect of food on molecular networks, and it turned out that this is a huge area to explore, because we have no idea what molecules are in our food, apart from the 100-120 molecules - mainly vitamins, fats - that are currently dealt with in nutritional science.

- There are strong business interests in this area.

- In fact, this is not the greatest difficulty, but the fact that the whole of nutritional science is still characterised by 19th century methods, working with astonishingly naive statistical tools, and the concept of Big Data has not even appeared. Therefore, in the lab, huge efforts are spent on collecting data, mapping food molecules and the interactions between them. There are so many problems that can be approached with our tools and that are still unsolved today that this seems to be a project that will take me well into retirement.

Image

Photo: László Emmer

- When you can deduce specific nutritional recommendations from partial results in a reaserch, do you immediately use them in your family's life? For example, are you now sipping homemade elderflower juice because you might have discovered important molecules in elderflowers?

- Elderflowers, and all plant foods, are full of useful substances, but too little of them is useless and too much is bad for you. One of the big problems with nutrition is that you're looking for that magic chemical, the magic pill, the superfood that keeps you young and makes you smart. But that's not what it's all about, it's about the balance of things. What that actually means is something that science revisits every five years. Ten years ago we wanted to eliminate fats, now it's increasingly clear that there's nothing wrong with fats, it's just a question of what you eat alongside them. To this day we believe that meat and animal foods are to be avoided, but over the last two or three years there has been growing evidence that these adverse effects are largely linked to processed and preserved or processed products. One of the big problems we are seeing right now is that 70 per cent of the world's calorie consumption is from processed food. Their chemical balance is skewed compared to natural food, and it is likely that these shifts are responsible for health problems such as obesity and heart disease. I tend to follow the approach of Michael Pollan, who says that much of the food we buy in supermarkets, fast food outlets and restaurants is not actually food.

Under his influence, my wife used to say that "anything my grandmother would have recognised as food is good", anything she wouldn't, we should avoid.

- In early October, your exhibition at the Ludwig Museum entitled "Hidden Patterns" will be opened. Does this have anything to do with the fact that you were studying to be a sculptor at some point in the past?

- I daresay it has something to do with it, but more than that. I usually communicate in three languages, two of which are known: the language of science - formulas, articles, algorithms - and the language of education - books and lectures. But for me, the visual language is just as important. In 1995 my first visualisation of networks appeared, and over the last 25 years we have worked a lot to create the visual dictionary of networks. In the last 10 years, museums and prestigious galleries have started to exhibit these works. The exhibition traces the evolution of the visual language of networks. There are a lot of graphics and sculptures, all with exciting content. At the University of Notre Dame in the US, while teaching physics, I took art courses. Aesthetics and artistic vision have crept into our scientific representations, and this is what we are trying to look into with the Ludwig Museum, and then continue at a major German museum, the ZKM in Karlsruhe.

- And this brings us to stepping across the walls between intellectual domains. The intersection not only between the natural and social sciences, but also between art and science, is evidence, thanks again to network research. Or to your personality?

- These walls have always been artificial. I do one thing: I want to understand complex systems. Languages, symbol systems and expressions are just tools to do that. We've always used drawings, graphs, visual models to explain how systems work, and visualizations are not just illustrations, they are an integral part of the process of discovery, helping us to formulate new ideas, new directions. Understanding is modelling the world. For example, I graduated from university without taking any courses, in Bucharest, in Budapest, or in Boston. Not because I didn't find the lectures important, but because I have no auditory memory, only visual. Even if I sat in a course, I could not remember anything by the end. I looked at the notes, bought five books on the subject and put the whole together. To this day, I still use drawings to communicate in the lab.

- Were you a child prodigy?

- It never occurred to me. Every parent has a genius child, and I was no more than that. Of course, like many researchers, I was quite introverted...

- That's not what your lectures say.

- That is a learned extroversion, I built up my communication and relationship skills between the ages of 24-28.

- An important element of which is humour...

- Yes, but I have learned very much that humour cannot be translated, it is very much defined by the cultural context. My classic example of this is linked to the mathematician Paul Erdős. He was a professor at the University of Notre Dame in the sixties, and when asked afterwards what he thought of the university, he said: it was a very exciting place, but for him there were too many plus signs. In Hungary, this statement is incomprehensible; Americans all knew that Notre Dame was the most important Catholic university in America.

- At the beginning of our conversation, at two o'clock, you gave me an hour, now it’s almost three...

- Yes, we have a group meeting at three, but we still have four minutes. I like to squeeze things because by doing so I can finish the day by six, have dinner and be with the family. In fact, my wife and I have recently introduced the notion of having a glass of wine at six to round off the working day. Because in this Covid-world it's hard to separate work and private life.

- Can your wife be your partner in work, too?

- More in human matters, when it comes to resolving conflicts or moral issues. She listens to my dilemma and I can trust her strong moral compass. One of the greatest tragedies of communism was that it disturbed our moral compass, we had to reset it. In America, as a teaching assistant, I was confronted with the fact that we were deceiving ourselves with cheating which in fact was an integral part of student life under communism. If the slightest suspicion of cheating was cast on anyone, they would be expelled. But most moral issues are not black and white, they are in the grey category, and I am still learning today when it goes to be rather black or rather white in certain cultures.

- You too do research based on data. Do you think it is vain hope to protect our data?

- I look at it as anything I type or retrieve on a message or on a computer can become public at some point. Because no matter how much we legislate, it's an unstoppable process to get access to it. Today, the social consensus in Europe and in the US is that we have a right to our data, but that right does not prevent it from being stolen, shared at random or perhaps changed by legislation and made public.

- In an ideal world, no one would say or write something that they would not say or write in front of a community.

- This alternative utopian world could be a very healthy one for me, but we are not morally up to the point where personal information is public. 

In 2010, two books were found in the old safe of the Scottish Mission's church on Vörösmarty Street: one was a wildflower album in English and the other a Bible. The books were inscribed with the same name: Jane Haining. That is all that remained of the great Scottish lady in Budapest, who knew how to be brave at a time when most people were only interested in saving their own skins.

Jane Haining was born on 6 June 1897 in a Scottish village called Dunscore. Little Jane was only five years old when she lost her mother. In Lynley Smith's book about Haining, 'From Matron to Martyr', we learn that Jane's father was a farmer, but it was important for him to educate his three daughters, to whom he read from the Bible every night. The family attended the local Presbyterian church - Jane kept her faith until the end of her life.

After leaving school, she became a clerk in a thread manufacturing company and worked there for more than ten years.

She was very impressed by the fact that one of her cousins was a missionary in India; she herself started volunteering with several organisations.

Among other things, she became a member of an anti-alcoholic movement and taught in her church's Sunday school. Her faith was important to her and she had a desire to help people.

The Scottish Mission School

In 1931 after a lecture Jane Haining joined the Scottish Jewish Mission. She left her clerical job and moved to Budapest in 1932, where she became the supervisor of the boarding section of the Scottish Mission School. The school admitted disadvantaged students with excellent academic results. Most of the children came from secularised Jewish families and a significant number were orphans or half-orphans. Although the mission had an undisguised aim of conversion, Haining did not support the 'forced' conversion of the girls, and the school took the view that the girls should first and foremost learn about their own religion. The girls loved Jane, who showed them great empathy and affection - and became the official guardian of several of them.

Image

Jane Haining with the girls at Lake Balaton Photo:Wikipedia

In 2014, an article on Haining's life was published in the Múlt-kor magazine, in which András Szécsényi quotes one of Jane's students as saying of her, "You always felt that she loved you the most." The Scottish country girl also started to learn Hungarian so that she could communicate with the little girls in their own language. Every summer she spent two months with the school near Lake Balaton.

Jane Haining and her companions introduced the Jewish girls to a Christianity that accepted them and saw them as equals.

A quiet six years followed, during which hundreds of students attended the school - but in 1938 everything changed.

After the Anschluss, Hungary became a direct neighbour of the Third Reich. It was then that the first refugees arrived at the Scottish Mission School. Many of the Austrian Jewish families tried to flee through Hungary, and some were stuck for a time in Budapest, where many of their daughters found a temporary home at the Mission School.

In the summer of 1939 Haining went home to Scotland, accompanied by a teacher of the school, Margit Prém. Decades later the BBC interviewed two of Jane's nieces, who told how the relatives did everything they could to persuade Jane not to return to Budapest. But she was adamant and said the girls needed her.

The war

After the outbreak of war, the Jewish Mission Committee ordered her home twice, but Jane Haining decided to stay. The vast majority of the school's British faculty returned home and were replaced by Hungarian educators. Because of the school's welcoming attitude, there was a huge over-enrolment and the number of Jewish students steadily increased. According to Smith, the school also gave money to help parents who had been made unemployed by Jewish law. Haining gave lectures on British culture to families hoping to escape to England.

In Smith's book, he quotes a former student of the school, Zsuzsanna Spiegel, who recalled this period: 'As long as it was possible, right up to 19 March 1944, the day of the German occupation, they kept everything outside these walls, all the horrors. We were children, all equal (Jews and Christians), and nothing mattered but knowledge."

During the war years, Jane Haining, in addition to helping the girls, regularly visited British prisoners of war held on Hungarian soil.

Szécsényi's article describes that on 19 March 1944, after the Germans had invaded Hungary, the Sztójay government shortened the school year, so that everyone would have to be sent home by 31 March. The Scottish (as the girls called the school), however, did not send the Jewish students away, but allowed them to stay at the boarding school. The school authorities entrusted Haining with the task of informing the girls of the order to sew a yellow star on their coats (one of the accusations later made against her by the Gestapo was that she had wept at the order.)

On the fourth of April, the Gestapo appeared in Vörösmarty Street to arrest Jane. It later emerged that she had been reported by an Arrow Cross relative of the school cook after Haining had a disagreement with him. Several eyewitnesses recalled in different ways what happened when she was taken away, but all of them described Jane saying goodbye as she was led out: "Children, don't cry, I'll be home for lunch."

Image

Jane Haining

Jane’s last message

In his biography, Smith describes how Haining, then 47, was taken first to the Majestic Hotel and then to Belvedere, where she was interrogated by the Gestapo. At the end of April, she was transferred to Fő Street Prison. She was charged with eight counts, including hiding Jewish girls, visiting British prisoners of war and illegally listening to BBC broadcasts. The only charge she denied was that she was "actively taking part in politics." Jane had a Swiss passport in vain, because she was taken by the Nazis to an internment camp in Kistarcsa and put on a train to Auschwitz on 15 May.

In 2019, the Scottish Review of Books published a detailed article on the missionary's last weeks. In Auschwitz, Jane Haining was classified as a political prisoner, her clothes were taken away, her hair was shaved of and she was tattooed with the number 79467 on her arm. For reasons unknown, the Germans allowed Haining to write a letter to Budapest. On 15 July 1944, in a letter from Auschwitz to Margaret Prém, she wrote that she missed her children and asked the British Red Cross to send her food parcels. The letter contains a difficult-to-read line, which, according to an article published in Múlt-kor, was later interpreted by many to mean that Haining had an inkling of what was in store for her: "Here, on the way to heaven, are mountains, but not as beautiful and high as ours." Two days later, Jane Haining died, and the camp authorities officially issued a death certificate for her, stating that she had died of "natural causes" in the Auschwitz-Birkenau hospital. However, according to some historians, Jane did not meet her end in hospital.

The researchers were able to identify her from the number she received in the camp, and according to the surviving documents, she was transferred to Auschwitz-Birkenau on 17 July, where she was sent to the gas chambers.

Smith describes how, following the death notification, the British Foreign Office promised an investigation into the case and that "if mistreatment caused the death, those responsible will be brought to justice." This was an absurd statement, since the British leadership knew what was happening in Auschwitz at the time.

Jane Haining was not forgotten by the former residents of the Scottish school after the war. In 1984, with the support of the Jewish community in Budapest, a memorial plaque was placed in her honour in Vörösmarty Street. In 1997, Israel's Yad Vashem Museum honoured the brave woman who risked her life to protect her students with the Righteous Among the Nations Medal.

References:
https://www.scottishreviewofbooks.org/free-content/jane-hainings-letter-from-auschwitz/
https://mult-kor.hu/20140522_az_embermento_jane_haining

- In October 2020, the debate over IVF was reignited, due to the Catholic Church's rejection of all forms of artificial reproductive techniques. What are your views on this issue?
- I'm in a lucky position because I can see the truth of both sides. Scientifically speaking, IVF is a great achievement, but as a man of faith, I am concerned about what happens to the deep-frozen, unused embryos during the process of artificial insemination. I cannot resolve this dilemma at the moment, so I will not go into it in any depth, but will instead tell you what I would like to see, what the solution could be: the establishment of a fertility centre (I deliberately do not call it an infertility centre) where the causes that prevent conception are treated and cured. Unlike in the case of IVF, the problem is not bypassed, but the two branches of so-called restorative medicine, NaPro and FEMM, follow protocols that enable future mothers and fathers to conceive without any artificial intervention. At the Irgalmasrendi Hospital in Buda, we are currently doing this on a small scale, with a waiting list of several months, but we are already working hard to increase capacity.

In the first three years of our work, we were able to help about a third of the couples who came to us. IVF is similarly effective, but there are a lot of health risks for the baby and the mother.

In the past, when I didn't know about these natural methods, I used to refer couples to fertility clinics, but I don't do that anymore. However, we do not engage in counter-propaganda, it is everyone's right to choose between the two.

– How do the NaPro and FEMM protocols differ from a traditional gynaecological examination?
In the Christian Family Centre of the Irgalmasrendi Hospital in Buda, we examine patients more comprehensively than is possible in private practice. In addition to gynaecologists, we have endocrinologists, haematologists, immunologists, male infertility andrologists working in this specialised outpatient clinic, so we can treat the problem holistically, in cooperation with each other.

Both NaPro and FEMM are based on observations of the cervix, which indicates hormonal changes in the female cycle. This, unlike the uncertain "calendar method", can be used to calculate the exact fertile days of the cycle and "see" when ovulation is not occurring. To give you an example: to be aware of the hormonal changes in the female cycle, it is a standard gynaecological practice to have two blood tests, one at the beginning of the cycle, between days 3-5, and one somewhere in the second half, and this is a much more complicated matter. It should be done after ovulation but before menstruation, preferably 7 days after ovulation. It is not so clear when ovulation occurs if we don't follow the body's signals. Each cycle is different, some menstruate every 23 days, others every 35 days, but ovulation does not necessarily occur every month.

Therefore it's not at all certain that it's a good idea to take a second blood sample on day 21 of the cycle, although this is generally what happens.

Using so-called cycle-tracking methods, which are based on monitoring signals from changes in mucus, body temperature, i.e. hormone levels, it is possible to calculate exactly on which day a second blood test should be done to draw accurate conclusions about how the body is functioning.

Image

Photo: Tamás Páczai

- What divides public opinion even more than IVF is the issue of abortion. The news of the tightening of Polish legislation on abortion last October caused a major stir not only in Poland but also here in Hungary. What is your position on abortion?

- We live in a world where the interest of the individual overrides the interest of another person or the community. This is liberalism. But I, as a man of faith, take the conservative side on this issue, as opposed to my obstetric position, because I am infinitely liberal on that.

For me, the interest of the community comes before the interest of the individual, and the interest of the community is to have as many children as possible.

I also believe that the foetus’s right to life is stronger than the right of self-determination of the mother. As a doctor, I have no right to decide who is entitled to live and who is not. The good thing is that in Hungary today there is freedom in this respect, too, and the doctor can decide whether or not to perform an abortion. I do not, and thank God there are many of us for whom life begins not at birth but conception. In any case, in my opinion, the Hungarian legislation is too liberal in terms of abortion, since pregnancy can be terminated up to the 12th week on the grounds of the mother's 'crisis', which is a very broad category.

- Have you ever met a pregnant woman in crisis?
-Yes, I met a lot. I do not have the right to persuade anyone to do this or that, but surely no one can forbid me from outlining the aspects that should be considered before making such a huge decision. In general, mothers do not forget once they have decided to abort their child, no matter how much thought they put into their decision. It is very touching when my patients who have finally decided to have a baby send me a baby photo with a simple "thank you" on it.

- How did your colleagues take your decision not to perform abortions?
- When, as a junior doctor, I indicated that I would not abort a foetus, some resented me for it, saying that I was pulling myself out of these ugly things. Yes, I am pulling myself out of these ugly things.

I don't know any colleagues who perform abortions without blinking an eye, yet many do, out of a sense of duty, even though they have as much choice as I do not to.

- Those who argue for the mother's right to self-determination claim, among other things, that no one should be obliged to raise a disabled child. Do you think the right to life of, say, a child with Down's syndrome is stronger in such a case? According to the Polish Constitutional Court, yes.
- The Bible, and the law for that matter, "speak" of the right to life, not the right to a healthy life. From this point of view, the answer to the question is "easy", but when it comes to the question of whether one can be obliged to take on such a spiritual and financial burden, the answer is not so clear-cut. If a state makes it mandatory to have these children, then I think it should also give them maximum assistance. My position is therefore that those who have been given life should be allowed to be born. To get the overall picture, it is important to know that abortions due to foetal abnormalities account for only a fraction of all abortions and that there are many more cases where a perfectly healthy foetus is aborted. Going back to the beginning of our discussion, natural family planning could also be a remedy for this problem, as cycle-tracking methods are also an excellent way of avoiding unwanted pregnancies. So, by teaching women, with the help of professionals, to understand how their own bodies work, the number of abortions could be significantly reduced. 

- Last year, you received the Families Award from the Minister for Families, Katalin Novák, in recognition of your work for the Képmás magazine and the Media for Families Foundation, and for your outstanding professional work on behalf of families. What were your thoughts at the time?

- This recognition is for the whole creative community, as it is teamwork at Képmás Publishing and the Media for the Family Foundation. The award also shows us that the work we do is a real gap-filler. The Media for the Family Foundation was founded 15 years ago by the staff of Képmás because they noticed, and research confirmed, that in the media the word ’family’ is used in a negative context in two out of three cases, mainly in the context of domestic violence. We started to consciously present the family in a positive context, using new tools, so with this award for media staff we also wanted to promote classical, conservative values.

– You were born in Budapest, but both sides of your family come from Transylvania. What lessons did you bring from home?

– I have six siblings, and I am the oldest. In such a large family, you are given a survival toolkit to help you cope in all areas of life. We were raised by our parents with religious, conservative values, we attended Catholic high schools, even before the change of regime. I was given parenting tasks and responsibilities quite early on, the technical term for this is parentification, and it is not easy to deal with its consequences, but I can see the benefits of it now.

And it's great that my siblings and I have formed a great little tribal alliance as we've reached adulthood, we like each other.

– Resolute, determined, responsible, ambitious, fierce, and brave - these are the words that come to my mind when I look at you. Were you like that as a child, too?

– Yes, I bring that from my childhood. Along with the notion that I've been trying to take responsibility for everything ever since. I put my own needs in the background if I have to, or I don't even articulate them, and I find it hard to say no. And when they do come up, my needs, they often do so violently. I have worked on myself for several years with the help of a professional to change all this, and I am proud to have been on this journey of self-development because I have started to live a more joyful life of much better quality through the therapeutic process. And when I am balanced and feel good, it has an impact on my colleagues, my children and my spouse. So it's worth fighting for your own well-being.

– You are the owner-manager of the agency Salt Communications, and you are also the managing director of the publishing house Képmás Publishers. Previously, you worked as a communications consultant in the Prime Minister's Office and managed the sponsorship business of the MOL Group. How did you and do you manage to combine all these tasks with family life and raising three children?

- Now that our kids have entered adolescence, it's a bit easier. But even before that, my husband and I found a way to balance work and family. Many people think of the work-life balance as a seesaw, and believe that if one side is up, the other must necessarily be down.

Image

Kata Molnár-Bánffy Photo: Tamás Páczai

I experience the opposite in my own life: if I have a flow experience at work, it is also very good for our family life.

- What do you think is the best thing about becoming a parent?

- Being a parent is an honour and a great gift from God. I have learned the most about life from my children. My above-average autonomous personality went through many changes when I became a mother - I was faced with tasks (such as childhood illnesses) that were out of my control. This made me feel desperate at first, and then I had to learn to deal with these situations with a lot of humility, and I became much stronger as a result. I am confident that, if not perfect, I could and can continue to be a good enough parent to my children.

- I know that you love hiking, for example, last year you and your husband walked from Budapest to Csíksomlyó, a total distance of 815 kilometres.

- Hiking and pilgrimage are not the same thing: last year we made this long journey as a pilgrimage, not for the pleasure of relaxation. It was a great experience for both of us, physically too, of course, but mainly spiritually and mentally. By the way, there are two things apart from my family and my work that give me deep pleasure: hiking and my vegetable garden. This year, my husband and I decided to hike the highest peaks of all the Hungarian mountains together, and by now, there aren’t many left. As for the vegetable garden, I am very proud of it. Every evening I go down to the garden, see how it's growing, pick a bunch of vegetables and eat them for dinner. I confess that I post about my vegetables on my Instagram page regularly, because for me, my garden and being partly self-sufficient is a huge experience, a great joy. A friend of mine found it strange that other people share photos of their kids and I share my potatoes and green beans.

- Going back to the magazine Képmás, which is very much concerned with the family, the concept of family and the subject itself has become very politicised. Doesn't that put you off?

- Képmás magazine and the Media for Families Foundation existed and promoted the importance of the family long before the issue became part of domestic politics.

On the one hand, we are pleased that the issue has entered the political arena, because it shows that there are figures in the political arena who recognise the importance of the family and are doing everything they can to strengthen it. On the other hand, it can also be counterproductive: if a political community makes a value its slogan, it can scare off social groups that do not identify with that political community but could identify with that value. This is what is happening with the family. Our work and our efforts for the family, for Christian conservative values, have been recognised by the government, but we do not do this work because of that recognition, but we do it because we believe that the family as an institution is good. Because it is so obvious to us, we have not learned to defend this essential institution, but now that it is under so much attack, we must learn to speak about it well and credibly to help those too who are discouraged by political slogans.

Image

Kata Molnár-Bánffy Photo: Tamás Páczai

- Képmás magazine has grown into a serious and high-quality brand, seen by many as an example.

- I am very happy about that. The magazine is about to turn twenty years old, it has grown from a parish magazine, and has been running in its current form for ten years. It was then that István Nagy, a designer with whom we also work at Salt Communications, designed its current form and image. Képmás is not a public affairs journal, but rather a cultural and family magazine in a broader sense. It is one of the few magazines where an article passes through several filters: we have an editor, a reader's editor and a proofreader. In addition to the quality of the content, we also pay a lot of attention to the quality of the visuals: each page is designed by a highly qualified graphic designer, and the photos and graphics are not just illustrations, but the visual world is part of the content.

So we believe in traditional quality, and we value our readers so much that we strive to give them the best we can.

- The "brother" of the Képmas magazine, kepmas.hu, has also evolved a lot: in the last two and a half years it has turned from a small marketing site into a portal with millions of visitors per month.

- We have a lot of work in this, and we still can't sit back. Our online platform is updated daily with fresh, original content, and we also regularly publish articles from our archives. It's not easy to find journalists for this job who are striving for quality as much as the Image itself. Today, journalism has lost its reputation and practically anyone can be a journalist if they claim to be one. Many people think that writing a newspaper is easy, but a real journalist knows that a good article is a hard, multi-day job. So let me send a word from here: anyone who feels that they meet the values of Képmás and the criteria of quality journalism is welcome.

- "One can and is free to be a Christian conservative. Even if there is a violent communication of this being not OK constantly pushed upon us, not only in Hungary but around the world. We have learnt to accept that others see the world through different eyes - and we can safely expect the same from them:  to look at our values with respect. It is, after all, based on the natural and on the rules of thousands of years of human coexistence." I have quoted this passage from a recent post on your Facebook page. Why did you feel the need to write this?

- It was meant as a kind of encouragement, because I see a crowd of people having second thoughts, especially conservative intellectuals. An image is beginning to emerge around the world that it is not modern, or even unacceptable, to believe in Christian values. Yet conservatism is not a guardian of the past, but of the future. Moreover, there is the issue of gender, which addresses morals and morality, too.  As if it were immoral to think, for example, that there are men and women in the world.

It is as if our desires carry as much weight as reality: the gender ideology movements have no respect for the created world.

It’s no longer just about that there are social sexes alongside the biological sex, but that the biological sexes are beginning to be completely negated, as if biology could lose its modernity. With this post, I was suggesting that we have no reason to have second thoughts about our own values, even if political communication deliberately camps us. Let us keep our values firmly in mind, let us distance ourselves from political parties. Let us be bold in expressing what we believe in, because in doing so we help each other.

Count János was born in 1901 in Nyitraújlak, in the Zobor region, to the Esterházy family of Galánta, who wrote their name in bold letters in our history. He lost his father at an early age, so he and his two siblings were brought up by their mother, who came from a Polish aristocratic family. The family lost 90 percent of their 5,000-acre estate in post-Trianon Czechoslovakia (as a result of a land reform that appeared democratic but was in fact strongly anti-German and anti-Hungarian). Yet they did not resettle in Hungary but remained on the land of their ancestors. Young János, who had graduated from high school and the Commercial Academy in Budapest, returned home himself and started farming on the remaining family estate. In 1924, he married Countess Lívia Serényi, and they had a son, János, and a daughter, Alice.

Meanwhile, his interest turned to politics and public life. In his new homeland, which had been artificially cobbled together by the great powers and claimed to be a civil democracy, the guiding principle of official policy was "Czechoslovakism". In order to establish Czech hegemony, it not only restricted the rights of the German, Hungarian, Ruthenian and Polish minorities but also took action against the Slovaks, who were to be incorporated into the Czech nation. Seeing this, Esterházy committed himself to the protection of the Hungarian minority and entered public life.

In the political arena

From 1932 he was President of the National Christian Socialist Party, and from 1935 he was a Member of Parliament. In his public activities, he not only sought to represent the interests of the hundreds of thousands of Hungarians in the area (“Felvidék”), but also spoke out for the autonomy of Ruzynskó, which was mainly inhabited by Ruthenians, and generally advocated the protection of minorities against Prague's overbearing power. When Beneš became president of the republic, he tried to bribe him by offering him a ministerial seat, but Esterházy refused to give in and in 1936 he founded the opposition United Hungarian Party. As a politician, he was a strong supporter of the revision of Trianon (Versailles Peace Treaty), or at least of self-determination for the local Hungarian community. It naturally followed that when the first Vienna decision reannexed the Hungarian-inhabited southern part of Felvidék to Hungary, he personally greeted Governor Horthy in Kassa. However, he himself, together with 60-70,000 other Hungarians living on the northern side of the new border, remained in Czechoslovakia and, after the break-up of Czechoslovakia, in independent Slovakia, and even became the only Hungarian member of the Slovak parliament. In 1939 he publicly welcomed the establishment of an independent Slovak state and negotiated with Prime Minister Jozef Tiso on behalf of the Hungarian minority.

He was not a blind nationalist: not only did he speak up for Hungarians on the Slovak side, but also negotiated for Slovaks in the reannexed territories with the Hungarian government.

He founded a newspaper called Új Hírek, and after its suppression, he founded a new one called Magyar Hírlap and founded the Madách Book Publishing House in Bratislava for the preservation of Hungarian culture. In the increasingly fascist Slovakia, as a believer in the Hungarian Christian-national ideal, he still hoped for the complete reannexation of the Felvidék, but he finally accepted the Slovak state as a reality, of which he was no enemy.

He was not, however, at peace with the German orientation of the country, about which, as a committed Catholic, he remarked that "our sign is the cross, not the swastika".

Sharing the traditional moderate anti-Semitist views of the Hungarian and Slovak elites of the time, he was still in favour of restricting the rights of the Jews, but when the Bratislava parliament decided in 1942 to deport Jews, based on race, he was the only one to vote against the proposal. His position became even more radicalized by 1944. He took an active part in actions to rescue Jews, but also helped his fellow Ruthenians threatened by Slovak nationalists, and helped many Polish soldiers and civilians to reach the safe West through Slovakia and Hungary.

In a memorandum, he protested against the German occupation of Hungary, and at home he criticized Tiso's unconditional German friendliness, risking imprisonment. When he was in Pest, he even had to endure being taken into custody by the Arrow Cross Party for a short period of time and was put on the Gestapo's wanted list.

Power shows no mercy

After the Soviet troops reached Bratislava, he tried to negotiate with the representative of the new Czechoslovak power, the communist Gustav Husak, again in the interests of the Hungarians, but Husak arrested him and handed him over to the Soviet military authorities. He was imprisoned in the KGB's notorious Lubyanka prison in Moscow, then sentenced to ten years on trumped-up charges in a sham trial and sent to the gulag in Siberia. His health was failing, but he did not break down, and with unflagging strength, he tried to keep the spirit alive in his fellow prisoners. Meanwhile, in his absence, he was sentenced to death in September 1947 by a Czechoslovak court as a war criminal, on charges of treason, subversion of Czechoslovakia, and collaboration with fascism. Two years later, the Soviet authorities extradited him to Czechoslovakia, where his death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment by presidential pardon. In Bratislava, he could have had the opportunity to escape and leave for the West, but he remained convinced of his innocence and his veraciousness.

In the years that followed, while his sentence was reduced to twenty-five years by the 1955 amnesty, he has been in almost all the prisons and especially the prison hospitals of the country, because his health was fading rapidly. He ended up in the prison in Mirov, where he died on 8 March 1957. His body was not released to his family but was buried in a mass grave in Prague, where his remains were only identified in 2011.

After the change of regime, the Hungarian community of Felvidék initiated his rehabilitation from false accusations of war crimes, as a tribute to his standing.

he was acquitted by the Russian court in connection with his conviction there, but has still not been rehabilitated in the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

In the meantime, in the Felvidék area, Hungary and Poland, his figure has become a symbol of standing up for Hungarians and Christianity. In Mírov, he was given a symbolic tomb, and in time, public statues and memorial plaques were erected, and streets and squares were named after him. He was solemnly commemorated by the Hungarian Parliament in 2001, and his remains were laid to rest in 2017 at the foot of Zobor, in Alsóbodok. His lifesaving work was particularly appreciated by the Polish state and church: in 2009 he was awarded a high state medal and, with the support of the Hungarian, Slovak, and Polish Catholic communities, the Archdiocese of Krakow officially initiated the beatification procedure, which received a positive response from Rome in 2020. It is hoped that in time Count János Esterházy, a martyr of faith and reconciliation between nations, a victim of the communist regime, will be elevated to the ranks of the blessed and perhaps one day to sainthood.

– In the hit film of the nineties, Pretty Woman, we learn that the first encounter with opera decides what happens next: you either love it or hate it. If you like it, you will always love it, if you don't, you may learn to appreciate it, but it will never get to your heart. What was your first "date" with opera like?
– Fascinating! My godmother was a schoolteacher in the countryside, who always had season tickets to the theatres and to the Hungarian State Opera. One day she couldn't make the trip, so I went instead, I was seven then, accompanied by a lady I didn't know. When we took our seats - in the middle of the front row - I was amazed. I was fascinated by the building and the atmosphere, and by the opera itself, the music, the playing. We were watching The Marriage of Figaro, and I must have had a very wistful look on my face, because the singer-actress playing the Countess looked out across the audience, and then looked back at me with her eyes rounded, and then remained so for the rest of the song.

By the way, what you said about Pretty Woman: in many cases, it is true that the first encounter with opera determines the later relationship with the genre, but you cannot generalize. If I take you to a performance that is great but far from your spiritual world, it may not find its way to your heart. As I remember, Edward, played by Richard Gere, took Vivien (Julia Roberts) to Traviata, and let's face it, with that opera is not hard to sweep someone off their feet at all, because it's full of heartfelt melodies, it's easy to relate to. It is not easy, however, to recommend a production to a novice opera-goer, who has to try out what style of music or directing they prefer. On the part of the audience, it requires active presence and openness, but on the other hand, sometimes one’s ears must be attuned to the music to understand it and to be affected by it.

– You grew up in a music-loving, singing-loving family in Csongrád. Have you never felt burdened by the fact that classical music was playing at home instead of pop?

– Come to think of it, it could have all gone wrong: I could have rebelled and defiantly chosen a different musical direction or no musical direction at all, but fortunately I didn't.

I'm grateful that my parents, especially my father - who worked as a teacher of Hungarian and Music, but also gave private lessons and taught at art school - instilled classical music and different styles of music in me. I sang in the small family choir from a very young age: with my father and sister, we regularly sang choral songs in churches and at all kinds of town events; I sang in summer music camps as a child and as a youth with the large choir in serious church works. I confess that I had a secret cassette tape when I was in lower school, on which one of my classmates recorded some pop songs I liked so that I could listen to popular music at home.

Image

Lilla Horti Photo: Zsanett Frisenhan

– I understand your doctor mother destined you for a career in law.
- Yes, but she saw how much I loved the flute and singing and how quickly I was improving at them. It was thanks to her parental support that after the art school in Csongrád I applied for the Szeged Conservatory of Music, majoring in flute. I continued my vocal training with Tímea Dulics, but one year as a flutist was enough for me to decide to finished my studies in classical singing with Tímea Zita Somogyvári. After graduating from high school, I was admitted to the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music, where I continued my studies under Ingrid Kertesi and Emese Virág, and then Éva Marton.

– Mimi from La Boheme, Fiordiligi from Cosí fan tutte, Nedda from Bajazzo, Rosalinda from The Bat - just a few of the roles you have sung. Obviously you try to identify with each role to the full, but which character have you been able to identify with from the first time you've played them?

-It was definitely the Mimi of La Boheme. Of course, I identify with all the characters and all the roles are dear to me, but it was the one that I had been longing for for many years and which found its way to my heart at once. As it happened, as a fresh graduate I had to play two leading roles at the same time: I had to step into the role of Mimi at the Hungarian State Opera House, and sing Rosalinda in The Bat in Pécs.

It was a daunting and big task to do two jobs besides doing a teaching degree at university.

– In 2015, you studied with Éva Marton at the Opera Master's course and a year later you won the second prize in the international singing competition named after her. How would you summarize your work together?
– Éva Marton is a brilliant singer and performer, I learned a lot from her, I found the time we spent together not enough. We could work together very well, and I was happy that a master with very high expectations and high standards inspired me to keep working and improving. She helped me a lot in terms of vocal technique, dramaturgy and acting. She has excellent insight, great musical, theatrical and dramaturgical sense. Once she came in to one of my rehearsals with Katalin Kokas and Emese Virág, we were performing a contemporary piece that night. It was the first time she heard our performance and the piece, but she gave us instructions that made our performance so much better. I was often her last student. She had hardly eaten, hardly drunk, was visibly tired, but she was still able to give a fantastic performance of an incredibly difficult phrase, sitting and without warm up. At those times I always wondered when I would reach that level.

– Do you consider yourself a perfectionist?
– Absolutely! I am always dissatisfied, and wish to follow in the footsteps of ideals such as Eva Marton, Monserrat Caballé or Maria Callas. My goal is to give people heartfelt and quality value with all my performances. We are artists of the moment, so it's natural that the voice doesn't always sound the same, and sometimes the tongue can slip during a performance. It happened to me as it did to some of the greatest artists of our time or the past. It used to bother me terribly at first, but some time ago I learned to beat myself up only that night and let it go the next day.

My body is my musical instrument, and my voice is an extremely sensitive, intangible instrument, and I have to enchant the audience with it night after night, finding the right tools and the right form to it.

I accept that it changes from year to year, that it needs constant work, and that on some days it obeys me easier, than on others.

– The world-famous tenor Luciano Pavarotti always had a certain white handkerchief in his hands when he performed - a mascot. Do you also have a mascot or a ritual that you like to use before a performance?
– I don't have a mascot, I have faith. Prayer is what calms me and helps me: to be able to be by myself before I go on stage and put all my burdens and all my worries in God's hands. I know that I am doing my best, but I ask Him to give me serenity, strength and peace, and to help me with what I no longer have control over.