Wacław Szybalski

Wacław Szybalski (born 1921 in Lwów, Poland - now L'viv, Ukraine) is a Professor of Oncology at the McArdle Laboratory for Cancer Research, University of Wisconsin-Madison Medical School.

Wacław Szybalski was born in a family from intelligentsia. His father, Stefan, was an engineer and his mother, Michalina, nee Rakowska, was a Doctor of Chemistry. The Szybalski family maintained close friendships with numerous outstanding representatives of the Polish intelligentsia in Lwów (Professor Jan Czekanowski - the father of Polish anthropology and Professor Rudolf Stefan Weigl, the outstanding bacteriologist, among others).

In 1939 he has graduated in famous VIIIth Gymnasium in Lwów. When the second World War began, from 23 September 1939, Lwów was occupied by Soviets authorities. Wacław Szybalski joint the Chemistry Department of Lwów Institute of Technology (Lwów Polytechnica), where he was entranced by the lectures of Professor Adolf Joszt, an outstanding expert on the processes of fermentation, who even than had a vision of developing the sciences in the direction of genetic engineering and biotechnology, which had a direct influence on Szybalski's further scientific development.