On November 14, ocular physiologist and creative arts philanthropist Laszlo Bito passed away from chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder, a condition that stemmed from his time as a forced laborer in a Hungarian coal mine, according to The New York Times.
Bito was born in 1934 in Budapest, and in 1951, he and his family were deported from the city by the Hungarian communist regime, according to his website’s biographical timeline. He ended up in the city of Komlo where we was forced to work in the coal mines. He became a local leader in a revolt against such forced labor, but when the revolution failed, he escaped to Austria. He was granted asylum in the United States in 1956. There, Bito earned a degree in chemistry from Bard College in New York. He went on to earn his PhD in medical cell biology and biophysics from Columbia University in 1963, ...
