Georg von Hevesy
Hevesy, Georg von (1885-1966) was born in Budapest, Hungary. He studied physics and chemistry at the University of Budapest and then continued his studies at the University of Freiburg in Germany. He received a doctoral degree in 1908.
After graduating, Hevesy worked for brief periods in Karlsruhe, Germany, and Zurich, Switzerland. He then studied at the University of Manchester in England with British physicist Ernest Rutherford, who won the 1908 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his pioneering research on the atom. Hevesy also became friends with another member of Rutherford's research team, the Danish physicist Niels Bohr.
Rutherford assigned Hevesy to work on the problem of separating by chemical means a radioactive substance then known as radium D from the lead in a sample of lead chloride. The task proved to be impossible, because radium D turned out to be an isotope of lead. Isotopes of the same chemical element have the same chemical properties, and so no chemical reaction can separate them.
From 1912 to 1913, Hevesy worked as a research assistant to the Austrian chemist Friedrich Adolf Paneth at the Vienna Institute of Radium Research. There, Hevesy developed the radioactive tracer technique. By mixing a small amount of radium D with ordinary lead—which is not radioactive—in a lead compound, he was able to mark the lead so that he could trace it through its chemical processes by measuring the radioactivity from the radium D. The radium D thus served as a radioactive tracer, or indicator, of lead. In 1913, he published his results in Zeitschrift für anorganische Chemie (Journal of Inorganic Chemistry). In writings in German, he used the German form of his name, Georg von Hevesy. Later works published in English carried the name George Charles de Hevesy.
Hevesy returned to Budapest in 1913 and became a lecturer at the university. During World War I (1914–1918), he served in the Austro-Hungarian army. After the war, he briefly taught at the University of Budapest.
In 1920, Hevesy worked at the University of Copenhagen's new Institute for Theoretical Physics, where Bohr was director. At the institute, he worked with Dutch physicist Dirk Coster. They examined zircon ore and in 1923 discovered a previously unknown chemical element with atomic number 72. They named this new element hafnium after the Latin name for Copenhagen.
Hevesy also continued to develop his radioactive tracer technique. In 1923, he used it to determine the absorption of lead in bean plants. It was the first time the technique had been used in a living organism. He then conducted tracer experiments with animals.
In 1926, Hevesy became a professor of physical chemistry at the University of Freiburg, Germany. There he developed a method of using X rays to analyze minerals. In 1930, he became a lecturer at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. In 1934, he moved to Denmark and worked at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen, where he was the first scientist to use an artificially produced isotope as a tracer.
After the Nazis took over the government of Denmark in 1943, Hevesy moved to Sweden. He became a professor at the University of Stockholm's Research Institute for Organic Chemistry and continued his tracer research. He became a Swedish citizen in 1945.
Hevesy wrote many papers and journal articles on blood chemistry, iron metabolism, and radiation effects in biochemistry. Many of these were later collected in the two-volume book Adventures in Radioisotope Research (1962) In addition to the Nobel Prize, Hevesy won 1958 Atoms for Peace Award.