Lajos Piko

Dr. Lajos Piko, of Pasadena, CA passed away on February 11, 2021. He was 92 years old. A native of Hungary, Piko studied at the Veterinary School in Budapest but was expelled in the last year for political reasons. He supported himself by becoming proficient in several languages (English, French, Russian) and working as a translator of the biological literature and an interpreter to visiting scientist at the Hungarian Academy of Science. After the quelling of the Hungarian uprising in 1956 he emigrated to France and obtained his veterinary doctorate at the Veterinary school in Paris. He continued to study at the Sorbonne and started to do research on fertilization in the Laboratory of Animal Physiology in Jouy-en-Josas near Paris. In 1960 he moved to the United States to join the Biology Division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena as a Research Fellow. He studied the cytology of fertilization and showed that the so-called cytoplasmic DNA in sea urchin eggs was, in fact, mitochondrial DNA. In 1966 he started a Development Biology Research Laboratory at the Veterans Administration Medical Center in Sepulveda, California, while maintainig his affiliation with Caltech as a Research Association. He published studies on the role of mitochondrial DNA in development and aging and on the molecular biology of early development in mice. He was the partner of the late Ingrid Gumpel who worked as an advisor to international students and scholars at Caltech.