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  • George de Hevesy
  • George de Hevesy (August 1, 1885 - July 5, 1966) was a Hungarian chemist who was important in the development of the tracer method where radioactive tracers are used to study chemical processes, e.g., the metabolism of animals. For this he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1943.

    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.
    To learn new methods, de Hevesy joined 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.
    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. 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.
    De Hevesy died in 1966 at the age of eighty and was buried in the Kerepesi Cemetery in Budapest, Hungary. He had made a total of 397 scientific publications. At his family's request, his ashes were interred at his birthplace in Budapest on April 19, 2001.

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