George De Hevesy Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1943. Date of Birth: 01.08.1885 Country: Hungary

Biography of Georg de Hevesy

Georg de Hevesy was born on August 1, 1885, in Budapest, Hungary. He was one of eight children born to Louis de Hevesy, a judge and manager of a mining company and several family farms, and Baroness Eugenia Schossberger.

Hevesy showed a keen interest in mathematics and physics from an early age and graduated from a church school in Budapest in 1903. He then attended the Budapest University for a year before transferring to the Berlin Institute of Technology. Due to poor health, he moved to the University of Freiburg in southern Germany, where he completed his doctoral degree in 1908 with a dissertation on the interaction of sodium with caustic soda melts.

For the next two years, Hevesy worked at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich under the guidance of Richard Lorenz, a renowned expert in the chemistry of molten salts. During his time in Zurich, he attended lectures by Albert Einstein, who was working at the University of Zurich, and visited his laboratory.

In 1910, Hevesy spent three months in Karlsruhe, Germany, collaborating on research with Fritz Haber. He then received a scholarship to work in the laboratory of Ernest Rutherford, a Nobel laureate in chemistry, at the University of Manchester in England. It was during this time that Hevesy developed a method to separate and detect the radioactive isotopes of lead and radium.

In 1913, Hevesy received an invitation to work at the University of Oxford in England, but the outbreak of World War I forced him to return to Vienna. He served in the military for two years and then worked as a technical controller at an electrochemical plant near Budapest. After the war, he became a professor of physical chemistry and the acting director of the Second Physical Institute at the University of Budapest.

In 1919, Hevesy visited Niels Bohr in Copenhagen, Denmark, who offered him a position at his institute. However, Hevesy chose to return to Hungary to complete his experiments. In 1920, he began working with Bohr in Copenhagen and, together with Dirk Coster, discovered a new element, hafnium, which they named after the city of its discovery.

In 1926, Hevesy became a professor of physical chemistry at the University of Freiburg. When Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, Hevesy resigned from his position but remained in Freiburg for another year to help his students complete their dissertations. He then returned to Copenhagen in 1934.

During the Nazi occupation of Denmark in 1940, many scientists lost their jobs or were arrested. Hevesy was allowed to continue his work until 1943. By that time, Bohr had already escaped to Sweden, and Hevesy followed him there. At the Stockholm Institute for Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry, Hevesy studied the metabolism of iron among other research projects.

Hevesy's most significant contribution to science was his development and application of radioactive isotopes as tracers in the study of chemical processes. He used isotopic labeling to measure the dynamics of chemical and physical reactions in living systems.

In 1944, Hevesy was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for his work on the use of isotopes as tracers in the study of chemical processes." Due to the disruptions caused by the war, he received the award at a later ceremony held by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

After the war, Hevesy continued to use isotopic labeling in research in various fields of physiology and biochemistry until his retirement in 1961. He became a Swedish citizen in 1945. In his later years, he suffered from declining health and spent his final months in a medical clinic in Freiburg. Hevesy passed away on July 5, 1966, due to a heart attack.

Georg de Hevesy left behind a lasting legacy in the field of chemistry through his pioneering work with isotopic tracers and his contributions to the understanding of chemical processes in living systems.