George de Hevesy · Science & Medicine
Pioneer of radioactive tracers in chemistry and biology and co-discoverer of hafnium; Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1943
1 August 1885, Budapest, Austria-Hungary — 5 July 1966, Freiburg im Breisgau, West Germany
Budapest · Freiburg · Manchester · Copenhagen · Stockholm
George de Hevesy is recognized among Jewish contributors to Science & Medicine — Pioneer of radioactive tracers in chemistry and biology and co-discoverer of hafnium; Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1943
Origins and early life
George de Hevesy was born György Bischitz in Budapest on 1 August 1885, the fifth of eight children of Lajos Bischitz, a mining company director ennobled in 1895, and of Baroness Eugénia Schossberger. He was of Jewish descent on both sides, his grandparents having given presidents to the Jewish community of Pest, but his family had become Christian and he was raised a Catholic, graduating in 1903 from the Piarist gymnasium.
He studied in Budapest, Berlin and Freiburg, where he took his doctorate in 1908, worked briefly with Fritz Haber, and in 1910 joined Ernest Rutherford's laboratory in Manchester.
Work and career
There he tried in vain to separate a radioactive substance from lead, and turned the failure into a method, since atoms inseparable from lead could mark it; early in 1913, with Friedrich Paneth in Vienna, he ran the first radioactive-tracer experiment. He settled in 1920 at Niels Bohr's institute in Copenhagen, where in 1923, with Dirk Coster, he discovered element 72, hafnium, and published the first study following a radioactive tracer through a living plant.
Professor at Freiburg from 1926, he fled Nazism in 1934 for Copenhagen, where artificial radioisotopes let him show that even the minerals of the skeleton are constantly renewed.
Recognition
When Germany occupied Denmark in April 1940 he dissolved in aqua regia the gold Nobel medals Max von Laue and James Franck had left at the institute; after the war the gold was recovered and the medals recast. In 1943, when Copenhagen was no longer safe for a scientist of Jewish origin, he fled to Stockholm, where in 1944 he received the 1943 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, unshared, “for his work on the use of isotopes as tracers in the study of chemical processes”.
He received the Atoms for Peace Award in 1959 and died in Freiburg on 5 July 1966; in 2001, at his family's request, he was reburied in Budapest's Kerepesi Cemetery.
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Source: Wikipedia — George de Hevesy
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Pioneer of radioactive tracers in chemistry and biology and co-discoverer of hafnium; Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1943
Source: Wikipedia — George de Hevesy
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