László Z. Bitó

László Z. Bitó (born 7 September 1934, Budapest) is a physiologist and a writer. As a researcher he has developed a medicine for glaucoma. As a writer he writes novels and essays.

László Bitó was born in Budapest, Hungary. His family was forced to leave Budapest during the Communist era. He served in a mine in Komló and became a local leader of the revolution in 1956. After the revolution was crushed by Russian forces, he fled to the United States where he won a scholarship and became a physiologist. He was granted asylum in the United States and came to Bard College in the winter field period of 1956–57. Bitó graduated from Bard College in 1960 as a pre-med biology major. He went on to obtain his Ph.D. from Columbia University in medical cell biology in 1963. His research led to the development of Xalatan, the drug that has saved the sight of millions of glaucoma sufferers. He has published more than 150 scientific articles and received, among many other honors, the highest recognition in the field of eye research, the Proctor Medal, in 2000 and the Helen Keller Prize for Vision Research in 2013. Upon retiring from Columbia University as Emeritus Professor of Ocular Physiology, he returned to Hungary and his first love of writing. Of his 14 nonscientific books—novels, essays, and three anthologies of some of his more than a hundred newspaper and magazine articles—some have appeared in translations in half a dozen countries.

In the United States László Bitó has built an academic career as an internationally known professor of physiology. Most of his academic career is connected to Columbia University (where he is Professor Emeritus of Ocular Physiology) and to the University of Puerto Rico where he studied the effect of ageing on the eyes of monkeys. The fruit of his research is Xalatan, the medicine for glaucoma. The development of Xalatan brought a fundamental change to the treatment of this blinding disease. He published more than 140 scientific papers and was awarded with the Proctor Medal (2000) and Columbia University Award for Distinguished Achievement (2004).

...
Wikipedia