György Hevesy Biography

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World of Scientific Discovery on György Hevesy

György Hevesy was born in Budapest on August 1, 1885 and died in Freiburg, Germany, on July 6, 1966. He attended the universities of Budapest, Berlin, and Freiburg. After graduation from Freiburg, he joined Ernest Rutherford's research laboratory at the University of Manchester, England.

The first task Rutherford proposed for him was the separation of the newly discovered radioactive isotope radium-D from ordinary, stable lead with which it occurred. Hevesy discovered that a separation was impossible. From this he concluded that radium-D was another form of lead which was like ordinary lead in all respects except that it was radioactive. The two forms of lead were shortly recognized as isotopes, and radium-D was identified as lead-210.

Hevesy realized the significance of this finding. Suppose that two isotopes of an element are identical in all respects except that one is stable and one, radioactive. If the radioactive isotope is substituted for its stable cousin in a compound, it will behave in exactly the same way--chemically and biologically--as the stable isotope. But, because of the radiation produced by the radioactive form, it will be possible to "trace" the movement of the isotope through chemical, physical, and biological processes. This principle forms the basis of using radioactive isotopes as tracers in many different medical, industrial, and research applications. As an example of Hevesy's use of this technique, he added radioactive lead to the water used in watering plants. He could then follow the movement of the radioactive lead through the stems, roots, leaves, and other structures of the plant. He also used radioactive phosphorus to study biological changes in tissue, blood, bone, and the brain.

Hevesy also used a sample of heavy water sent to him by Harold Urey to carry out the first non-radioactive tracer studies, involving water exchange between fish and their environment and within the human body.

After World War I, Hevesy moved to the Institute of Physics at Copenhagen, Denmark. There he worked on methods for separating the isotopes of an element from each other. He used fractional distillation, for example, to achieve a partial separation of the isotopes of mercury.

During Hevesy's time at Copenhagen, his mentor, Niels Bohr, suggested that Hevesy and a colleague, Dirk Coster, search for missing element 72 in ores of its close chemical cousin, zirconium. X-ray analysis of these ores showed a set of spectral lines that did not belong to zirconium. Hevesy and Coster concluded that the spectral lines revealed the missing element. In 1923, they announced the discovery of this element and gave it the name hafnium.

Hevesy received the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1943 for his work on the use of radioactive isotopes as tracers. He died in 1996.