László Bitó was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1934. In the communist dictatorship after WWII, his family was among the many thousands marked as bourgeoisie, reactionaries, enemies of the working class, and in 1951 they were deported to a small village in eastern Hungary. In ’54 László was drafted into a forced labour unit to work in a coal mine. In ’56 he and his comrades disarmed their guards to join the revolution, but when it was crushed he recognized that he could no longer live in the hopelessness of a returning dictatorship. Escaping from Hungary, he ended up in New York, where he earned a Ph.D. in Medical Cell Biology and Biophysics at Columbia University. He then joined Columbia’s Research faculty where his work led to the development of a new approach to the reduction of eye pressure that saved the sight of millions of glaucoma sufferers. Upon retirement from Columbia as Emeritus Professor, László Bitó returned to his native Hungary and has started a second career as a novelist and journalist.

 See also www.laszlobito.com.