György Hevesy
Born	(1885-08-01)1 August 1885 Budapest, Hungary
Died	5 July 1966(1966-07-05) (aged 80) Freiburg, Germany
Citizenship	Germany
Nationality	Hungarian
Fields	Chemistry
Institutions	University of Budapest Niels Bohr Institute ETH Zürich University of Freiburg University of Manchester Stefan Meyer Institute for Subatomic Physics
Alma mater	University of Freiburg
Doctoral advisor	Georg Franz Julius Meyer
Doctoral students	Max Pahl
Known for	Hafnium Radioactive tracer
Notable awards	Nobel Prize for Chemistry (1943)

George Charles de Hevesy, Georg Karl von Hevesy, (1 August 1885 – 5 July 1966) was a Hungarian radiochemist and Nobel 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.

Biography[link]

Early years[link]

Hevesy György was born in Budapest, Hungary to a wealthy and ennobled Hungarian Jewish^[1] family, the fifth of eight children to his parents Lajos (Louis) Bischitz and Baroness Eugenia (Jenny) Schossberger (ennobled as "De Tornya"). Grandparents from both sides of the family had provided the presidents of the Jewish community of Pest.^[1] George grew up in Budapest and graduated high school in 1903 from Piarista Gimnázium. The family's name in the 1904 was Hevesy-Bischitz, and Hevesy later changed his own.

De Hevesy began his studies in chemistry at the University of Budapest for one year, and at the Technical University of Berlin for several months, but changed to the University of Freiburg. There he came in contact with Ludwig Gattermann. In 1906 he started his Ph.D. thesis with Georg Franz Julius Meyer, acquiring his doctorate in physics in 1908. In 1908 Hevesy got a position at the ETH.

Research[link]

When Richard Lorenz left for the University of Frankfurt and Richard Willstätter tried to convince him to stay in Zurich he decided to go to the University of Karlsruhe to work with Carl Bosch. To learn new methods, de Hevesy joined Ernest Rutherford's laboratory at the University of Manchester in 1911 where he met and became friends with Niels Bohr.

In 1923 de Hevesy co-discovered hafnium (₇₂Hf) (Latin Hafnia for "Copenhagen", the home town of Niels Bohr), with Dirk Coster. Mendeleev's periodic table in 1869 put the chemical elements into a logical system, however there was missing a chemical element with 72 protons. On the basis of Bohr's atomic model Hevesy came to the conclusion that there must be a chemical element that goes there. The mineralogical museum of Norway and Greenland in Copenhagen furnished the material for the research. Characteristic X-ray spectra recordings made of the sample indicated that a new element was present. This earned him the 1943 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Hevesy was offered and accepted a job from the University of Freiburg. Supported financially by the Rockefeller Foundation, he had a very productive year. He developed the X-ray florescence analytical method, and discovered the Samarium alpha-ray. It was here he began the use of radioactive isotopes in studying the metabolic processes of plants and animals, by tracing chemicals in the body by replacing part of stable isotopes with small quantities of the radioactive isotopes. In 1923, Hevesy published the first study on the use of the naturally radioactive ₂₁₂Pb as radioactive tracer to follow the absorption and translocation in the roots, stems and leaves of Vicia faba, also known as the broad bean.^{[2] [3]}

World War II and beyond[link]

When Germany invaded Denmark in World War II, de Hevesy dissolved the gold Nobel Prizes of Max von Laue and James Franck with aqua regia to prevent the Nazis from stealing them. He placed the resulting solution on a shelf in his laboratory at the Niels Bohr Institute. After the war, he returned to find the solution undisturbed and precipitated the gold out of the acid. The Nobel Society then recast the Nobel Prizes using the original gold.^[4][5]

In 1943, Copenhagen was no longer seen as safe for a Jewish scientist, and de Hevesy fled to Sweden, where he worked at the Stockholm University College until 1961. Interestingly enough, in Stockholm, de Hevesy was received at the department of German-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.

During his time in Stockholm, de Hevesy received the Nobel Prize in chemistry. He later was inducted as a member of the Royal Society and received the Copley Medal, of which he was particularly proud. De Hevesy stated: "The public thinks the Nobel Prize in chemistry for the highest honor that a scientist can receive, but it is not so. Forty or fifty received Nobel chemistry prizes, but only ten foreign members of the Royal Society and two (Bohr and Hevesy) received a medal-Copley." George de Hevesy was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1942, and his status was later changed to Swedish member. In 1949 he was elected Franqui Professor in the University of Ghent. He received the Atoms for Peace Award in 1958 for his peaceful use of radioactive isotopes.

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. De Hevesy died in 1966 at the age of eighty and was buried in the Kerepesi Cemetery in Budapest, Hungary.^[6] He had published a total of 397 scientific publications, one of which was the Becquerel-Curie Memorial Lecture, in which he had reminisced about the careers of pioneers of radiochemistry.^[7] At his family's request, his ashes were interred at his birthplace in Budapest on April 19, 2001.

See also[link]

• List of Jewish Nobel laureates
• Johanna Bischitz de Heves
• 10444 de Hevesy

References[link]

Further reading[link]

External links[link]

• Media related to George de Hevesy at Wikimedia Commons
• George de Hevesy – Biography
• Annotated bibliography for George de Hevesy from the Alsos Digital Library for Nuclear Issues

v t e Hungarian or Hungarian-Born Nobel Laureates       Lénárd Fülöp (1905) Bárány Róbert (1914) Zsigmondy Richárd (1925) Szent-Györgyi Albert (1937) Hevesy György (1943) Békésy György (1961) Wigner Jenő (1963) Gábor Dénes (1971) Polányi János (1986) Harsányi János (1994) Oláh György (1994) Kertész Imre (2002) Avram Hershko (2004)

James Franck
Born	(1882-08-26)26 August 1882 Hamburg, German Empire
Died	21 May 1964(1964-05-21) (aged 81) Göttingen, West Germany
Nationality	German
Fields	Physics
Institutions	University of Berlin University of Göttingen Johns Hopkins University University of Chicago
Alma mater	University of Heidelberg University of Berlin
Doctoral advisor	Emil Gabriel Warburg
Doctoral students	Wilhelm Hanle Arthur R. von Hippel Theodore T. Puck
Known for	Franck-Condon principle Franck-Hertz experiment
Notable awards	Nobel Prize for Physics (1925)

James Franck (26 August 1882 – 21 May 1964) was a German physicist and Nobel laureate.

Biography[link]

Franck was born to Jacob Franck and Rebecca Nachum Drucker. Franck completed his Ph.D. in 1906 and received his venia legendi, or Habilitation, for physics in 1911, both at the University of Berlin, where he lectured and taught until 1918, having reached the position of extraordinarius professor. After World War I, in which he served and was awarded the Iron Cross 1st Class, Franck became the Head of the Physics Division of the Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft for Physical Chemistry. In 1920, Franck became ordinarius professor of experimental physics and Director of the Second Institute for Experimental Physics at the University of Göttingen. While there he worked on quantum physics with Max Born, who was Director of the Institute of Theoretical Physics.

In 1925, Franck received the Nobel Prize in Physics, mostly for his work in 1912-1914, which included the Franck-Hertz experiment, an important confirmation of the Bohr model of the atom.

James Franck, Chicago 1952

In 1933, after the Nazis came to power, Franck, being a Jew, decided to leave his post in Germany and continued his research in the United States, first at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and then, after a year in Denmark, in Chicago. It was there that he became involved in the Manhattan Project during World War II; he was Director of the Chemistry Division of the Metallurgical Laboratory^[1] at the University of Chicago. He was also the chairman of the Committee on Political and Social Problems regarding the atomic bomb; the committee consisted of himself and other scientists at the Met Lab, including Donald J. Hughes, J. J. Nickson, Eugene Rabinowitch, Glenn T. Seaborg, J. C. Stearns and Leó Szilárd. The committee is best known for the compilation of the Franck Report, finished on 11 June 1945, which recommended not to use the atomic bombs on the Japanese cities, based on the problems resulting from such a military application.

When Nazi Germany invaded Denmark in World War II, the Hungarian chemist George de Hevesy dissolved the gold Nobel Prizes of Max von Laue and James Franck in aqua regia to prevent the Nazis from stealing them. He placed the resulting solution on a shelf in his laboratory at the Niels Bohr Institute. After the war, he returned to find the solution undisturbed and precipitated the gold out of the acid. The Nobel Society then recast the Nobel Prizes using the original gold.^[2]

In 1946 Franck married Hertha Sponer, his former assistant in Göttingen. He died suddenly in 1964 while visiting Göttingen.^[3]

Honours and awards[link]

• 1925: Nobel Prize in Physics The award was shared with Gustav Ludwig Hertz, and it was for their discovery of the laws governing the impact of electrons on atoms
• 1951: Max Planck Medal of the Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft
• 1953: Honorary citizen of Göttingen
• 1955: Rumford Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences - For his work on photosynthesis
• 1964: Elected as a Foreign Member of the Royal Society of London, for his contribution to the understanding of exchanges of energy in electron collisions, to the interpretation of molecular spectra, and to problems of photosynthesis

See also[link]

• List of Jewish Nobel laureates
• Franck-Condon principle
• Franck-Hertz experiment

References[link]

1. ^ The Metallurgical Laboratory – known as the Met Lab – was one of four main sites working on the Manhattan Project. The other three were Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and Hanford Site.
2. ^ "Adventures in radioisotope research", George Hevesy
3. ^ See this site at Duke University.

Further reading[link]

• Kuhn, H.G. (1965). "James Franck, 1882-1964". Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 11: 53–74. DOI:10.1098/rsbm.1965.0004. ISSN 0080-4606. JSTOR 769261. 
• Shampo, M. A.; Kyle, R. A. (September 1984). "James Franck and Gustav Hertz". JAMA 252 (11): 1426. DOI:10.1001/jama.252.11.1426. PMID 6381774. 
• Rosenberg, Jerome L. (2004). "The Contributions of James Franck to Photosynthesis Research: A Tribute". Photosyn. Res. 80 (1–3): 71–6. DOI:10.1023/B:PRES.0000030453.66865.f6. PMID 16328811. 

External links[link]

• Nobel Prize Biography
• Annotated bibliography for James Franck from the Alsos Digital Library for Nuclear Issues
• James Franck Biography – American Philosophical Society (Bio appears after Sommerfeld's)