Professor George de Hevesy, c mid-20th century

George Charles de Hevesy, born György Bischitz, 1 August 1885 - 5 July 1966 was a Hungarian radiochemist. de Hevesy won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1943 for his role in the development of radioactive tracers to study chemical processes in the metabolism of animals. He co-discovered the element hafnium. He was born to a wealthy, noble family in Budapest. His family converted to Roman Catholicism from Judaism. de Hevesy studied at the University of Budapest for one year and then at Technische Hochschule in Charlottenburg and then on to the University of Freiburg. He worked on his PhD thesis under Georg Franz Julius Meyer, obtaining his doctorate in 1908. He was offered a position at ETH Zurich, where he then was able to chose where he wanted to research. He worked with Fritz Haber at Karlsruhe, then Ernest Rutherford at Manchester, and also met Niels Bohr there. He worked in Budapest for two years from 1918 to 1920. From 1920, he settled in Copenhagen. He completed the work on radioactive isotopes in 1923, that would later award him the Nobel Prize. In 1924, he married Pia Riis and they had one son and three daughters. After the Nazis came to power, in 1934, de Hevesy moved to Niels Bohr's Institute at the University of Copenhagen. Whilst working in Denmark, Max von Laue and James Franck sent their Nobel Prizes (made of gold) to him to keep them safe from the Nazis. However, the 1940 invasion of Denmark endangered them. de Hevesy dissolved them in aqua regia and kept them hidden. After the war, he retrieved the gold out of the solution and The Nobel Society had them recast. After Denmark became unsafe for a Jewish scientist, he fled to neutral Sweden in 1943, and he moved to University of Ghent in 1949, where he stayed until retirement. de Hevesy died in 1966, aged 80, and was buried in Freiburg. He was moved and reburied in Budapest in 2000. In his life he received the Nobel Prize, but also the coveted Copley Medal in 1949, as well as the Faraday Lectureship Prize in 1950, and also the Atoms for Peace Award in 1958. He was also a Fellow of the Royal Society.