George de Hevesy

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"de Hevesy" redirects here. For the asteroid, see
10444 de Hevesy
.
The native form of this personal name is Hevesy György Károly. This article uses Western name order when mentioning individuals.
George de Hevesy
University of Freiburg
Known for
Spouse
Pia Riis
​
(m. 1924)​
Children4
Parents
  • Lajos Bischitz (father)
  • Eugénia Schossberger (mother)
Awards
University of Freiburg
University of Manchester
Stefan Meyer Institute for Subatomic Physics
Doctoral advisorGeorg Franz Julius Meyer
Other academic advisorsFritz Haber
Ernest Rutherford
Doctoral studentsRolf Hosemann
Johann Böhm
Other notable studentsErika Cremer (postdoc)

George Charles de Hevesy (born György Bischitz; Hungarian: Hevesy György Károly; German: Georg Karl von Hevesy; 1 August 1885 – 5 July 1966) was a Hungarian radiochemist and Nobel Prize in Chemistry laureate, recognized in 1943 for his key role in the development of radioactive tracers to study chemical processes such as in the metabolism of animals. He also co-discovered the element hafnium.[1][2][3][4][5][6]

Biography

Early years

Hevesy György was born in

Roman Catholicism.[8] George grew up in Budapest and graduated high school in 1903 from Piarist Gimnázium.[9]
The family's name in 1904 was Hevesy-Bischitz, and Hevesy later changed his own.

De Hevesy began his studies in chemistry at the

Manchester, England, where he also met Niels Bohr. Back at home in Budapest, he was appointed professor in physical chemistry
in 1918. In 1920, he settled in Copenhagen.

Research

In 1922, de Hevesy co-discovered (with

transition element to the chemist Charles Bury.[citation needed
]

Supported financially by the

translocation in the roots, stems and leaves of Vicia faba, also known as the broad bean.[11][12] Later, in 1943, the work on radioactive tracing would earn Hevesy the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.[13]

In 1924, Hevesy returned to Freiburg as Professor of Physical Chemistry. In 1930, he went to

University of Stockholm
.

World War II and beyond

Stolpersteine memorials for Georg and his wife Pia de Hevesy in Freiburg

Prior to the onset of World War II, Max von Laue and James Franck had sent their gold Nobel Prize medals to Denmark to keep them from being confiscated by the Nazis. After the Nazi invasion of Denmark this placed them in danger; it was illegal at the time to send gold out of Germany, and were it discovered that Laue and Franck had done so, they could have faced prosecution. To prevent this, de Hevesy concealed the medals by dissolving them in aqua regia and placing the resulting solution on a shelf in his laboratory at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen. After the war, he returned to find the solution undisturbed and precipitated the gold out of the acid. The Nobel Society then recast the medals using the recovered gold and returned them to the two laureates.[14][15]

By 1943, Copenhagen was no longer safe for a Jewish scientist and de Hevesy fled to Sweden, where he worked at the

University of Stockholm until 1961. In Stockholm, de Hevesy was received at the department of chemistry by the Swedish professor and Nobel Prize winner Hans von Euler-Chelpin
, who remained strongly pro-German throughout the war. Despite this, de Hevesy and von Euler-Chelpin collaborated on many scientific papers during and after the war.

While in Stockholm, de Hevesy received the Nobel Prize in chemistry. He was later inducted into the

radioactive isotopes
.

Family life and death

George de Hevesy's grave in Budapest. Cemetery Kerepesi: 27 Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

De Hevesy married Pia Riis in 1924. They had one son and three daughters together, one of whom (Eugenie) married a grandson of the Swedish Nobel laureate

Kerepesi Cemetery in Budapest, Hungary. He had published a total of 397 scientific documents, one of which was the Becquerel-Curie Memorial Lecture, in which he had reminisced about the careers of pioneers of radiochemistry.[17]
At his family's request, his ashes were interred at his birthplace in Budapest on 19 April 2001.

On 10 May 2005 the Hevesy Laboratory

Risø National Laboratory for Sustainable Energy, now Technical University of Denmark
, DTU Nutech. It was named after George de Hevesy as the father of the isotope tracer principle under the initiative of the lab's first director, Prof. Mikael Jensen.

See also

References

  1. ^
    S2CID 122095945
    .
  2. S2CID 6640231
    .
  3. PMID 4870858
    .
  4. PMID 4865432
    .
  5. PMID 14184278
    .
  6. ^ Weintraub, B. (April 2005), "George de Hevesy: Hafnium and Radioactive Traces; Chemistry", Bull. Isr. Chem. Soc. (18): 41–43
  7. ^
    ISBN 978-0-85274-555-7
  8. ^ "George de Hevesy, Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1943". geni_family_tree. August 1885.
  9. ISBN 9780615573106
    , retrieved 6 June 2023
  10. ^ Norrby, Erling (2013), Nobel Prizes and Nature's Surprises
  11. PMID 395289
    .
  12. PMID 16743235
    .
  13. ^ "The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1943". NobelPrize.org.
  14. ^ Hevesy, George (1962), Adventures in radioisotope research, vol. 1, New York: Pergamon press, p. 27
  15. ^ Birgitta Lemmel (2006). "The Nobel Prize Medals and the Medal for the Prize in Economics". The Nobel Foundation.
  16. ^ Scripps Log obituaries, http://scilib.ucsd.edu/sio/biogr/ScrippsLogObits.pdf Archived 21 October 2020 at the Wayback Machine
  17. PMID 13714019
  18. ^ Hevesy Laboratory

External links

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