Pioneering TB researcher, 91, wins The Times Active Life Award

After escaping Czechoslovakia in 1968, Juraj Ivanyi devoted his life to science. His enduring drive has now been recognised

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/science/article/the-times-active-life-award-juraj-ivanyi-kfh2n5fmn

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Professor Juraj Ivanyi remembers being ten when German soldiers in Slovakia knocked on the door of the family home to ask for directions while his father hid in a wardrobe
Jack Taylor for The Times

At 70 years old, with more than 200 scientific papers under his belt, Professor Juraj Ivanyi could respectably have looked back upon an illustrious career and decided to call it a day. Instead, he kept going. Twenty-one years and 32 scientific papers later, his enduring drive hasn’t wavered. In recognition of his achievement, last week Ivanyi, 91, who survived Slovakia during the Second World War and went on to devote his life to tuberculosis research, won The Times Sternberg Active Life Award. Created in 2008 by Sir Sigmund Sternberg, the late Hungarian-British businessman and philanthropist, in partnership with The Times, the awards celebrate outstanding contributions made by people aged over 70 to their communities and to public life. Nearing his 92nd birthday in June, Ivanyi has continued to write, mentor and follow research. He is motivated by a conviction that science should serve public health and the fact that research is his “only real hobby”.


Ivanyi at King’s College London
Jack Taylor for The Times

A secret nomination

The award came as a surprise. He was nominated in secret by his stepdaughter Naomi Honey. “She didn’t tell anyone, but she consulted with three of my scientific colleagues,” he said. “As much as I appreciate that the trustees and judges selected me, I equally appreciate that my stepdaughter chose to do it entirely on her own, as a reflection of our loving relationship.” It was a “pleasurable” experience to accept the award at 11 Downing Street, conveniently located for his celebratory dinner at his late wife’s favourite restaurant, Thai Pot. Ivanyi settled in Britain in 1968, with his first wife, Lida. He was offered a job while on holiday in London, as the Warsaw Pact invasion crushed the Prague Spring. He chose not to return to Czechoslovakia. “We never regretted it,” he said. “This is my home.” He remarried after the death of his first wife and maintains close relationships with his four stepdaughters and four grandchildren. He met his late wife, Catherine, known as Katie, at a concert hall in Blackheath. They spent 21 years together before her death in 2023. “It is to her credit that I continued spending my time with my hobby, which was doing research,” he said. “We had a very complementary and relaxing, loving relationship.”

Refusing to retire

Although he is very modest about his achievements, they were groundbreaking. Ivanyi helped advance the world’s understanding of tuberculosis, the immune system’s response to it, early diagnosis and why it has proven so difficult to control. He was among the first researchers to make monoclonal antibodies against tuberculosis in the Eighties, work that opened up possible diagnostic uses and helped establish his reputation in the field. Over the decades he held senior roles at the Wellcome Research Laboratories and as director of the MRC Tuberculosis Unit at Hammersmith Hospital, later continuing his work through an honorary professorship at King’s College London. In academic research, the convention has long been to retire aged 65 and move on from the institution that employed you. Ivanyi was not about to let that stop him. He spent 21 years at Guy’s Hospital, King’s College London, calling it quits on laboratory work at the age of 85.

Accidental path to tackling a deadly disease

Science wasn’t his first love; he had originally wanted to be an engineer. Yet under the influence of his brother, Pavol, he found his way into medicine as an undergraduate student in Prague. “I was active in [scientific] research, instead of having other hobbies for leisure,” he said. Tuberculosis fascinated him partly because, scientifically, it is not like many other infectious diseases. “In tuberculosis, you have immune responses which help not the host, but the bacterium,” he said. That, he argued, was one reason TB has been so hard to tackle. Although it became curable with chemotherapy in the Fifties, it still spreads because many people transmit infection before they are diagnosed. “It mainly affects poor people in poor countries and poor people in rich countries,” he said. He is still driven to close the gap between scientific papers and real-world benefit. “We scientists publish, and our career is determined by how much research we do, but it’s a long way before this research is translated into helping people,” he said.

Surviving the war....................

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