ג'וארג' צ'רלס דה הבשי

George Charles de Hevesy (1885-1966), chemist, isotopes pioneer, and Nobel Prize winner, born in Budapest, Hungary (then part of Austria-Hungary), to a Roman Catholic family of Hungarian Jewish descent. He studied in Budapest and in Freiburg. In 1908, after obtaining his doctorate at Freiburg, he worked with Lorenz at the Technische Hochschule in Zurich, Switzerland, with Haber at Karlsruhe, and with Rutherford in Manchester, England. In 1913 he started to work with F. Paneth in Vienna, Austria, on radioactive isotopes. This was the beginning of the use of radioactive tracers or "labeled atoms," an important tool in chemical and biological research. When World War I broke out in 1914, Hevesy joined the Austro-Hungarian army as technical supervisor of the state electrochemical plant in the Carpathians. After the war he returned to Budapest and during the revolution of 1918-19 he resumed his studies of isotope tracers.

In 1920 he joined Niels Bohr at the new institute of theoretical physics in Copenhagen. There, together with D. Coster, he discovered a new element, no. 72, which he called hafnium. In 1923 he revealed in a paper the first use of radioactive tracers in a biological problem and in 1924 their first use in animal physiology. In 1926 Hevesy became professor at Freiburg, Germany; there he added a new field – X-ray fluorescence – as a method of analysis of trace materials in minerals, rocks, and meteorites.

In 1930 to 1931 Hevesy was one of the two George Fischer Baker Non-Resident Lecturers in Chemistry at Cornell University, in Ithaca, N.Y. He lectured on analysis by means of X-ray, the discovery and character of hafnium, and the chemical composition of the earth and the comic abundance of the elements.

In 1934 he was forced to resign from his position at Freiburg on account of his Jewish origins and returned to the Copenhagen institute. The discovery of artificial radioactive elements immensely enhanced the utility of the tracer technique in research work. After 1938 Hevesy gave his whole attention to the use of this tool in biochemical research. When Copenhagen was no longer safe he escaped to Sweden where he continued his work. In 1943 he was awarded the Nobel Prize "for the use of isotopes as tracers in the study of chemical processes." After World War II, Hevesy remained in Stockholm, Sweden, as professor in the institute of organic chemistry of the university. His biological work continued, largely on nucleic acids, the metabolism of iron and calcium, cancer anemia, and effects of radiation. Among Hevesy's other awards and honors were the "Pour le Merite" from the German president Heuss and the Atoms for Peace Award (New York, 1959).

His major published works are: "Recherches sur les proprietes du hafnium" (1925); "A Manual of Radiactivity" (co-author, Fritz Paneth, two additions); "Das Alter der Grundstoffe" (1929); "Chemical Analysis by X-Rays and Its Applications" (1932; translated also into Russian, 1935); "Artificial Radioactivity of Scandium" (1935); "Action of Neutrons on the Rare Earth Elements" (Hilde Levi, co-author, 1936); "Excretion of Phosphorus" (Ladislau Hahn and O. Rebbe, co-authors, 1939).