De Hevesy

George de Hevesy (1885-1966 Nobel Prize for chemistry 1943) and Dirk Coster (1889-1950). The search for this element was long, and it was eventually found as a companion of zirconium minerals by means of X-ray spectroscopy. 

In this connection, A. B. Garrett (1963) reports the following as a direct quote from G. de Hevesy (NLC 1943 ) who worked with E. Rutherford in Manchester between 1910 and 1913. 

The last part of de Hevesy s statement does, of course, allude to his pioneering work on the use of radioactive tracers. 

But how He didn t want to bury them because they could always be found and dug up.The Nazis made sending gold out of the country illegal, and the medals had the names of the Nobel Prize winners on them, so if they were discovered, James and Max would be imprisoned, or worse. A scientist named George de Hevesy helped solved the problem. George was a chemist who later won a Nobel Prize for his work in chemistry. 

F. Soddy Oxford, UK use of radioactive elements as indicators nominated jointly with G, de Hevesy... 

While he was investigating radioactive isotopes with Ernest Rutherford in 1913, George de Hevesy had an idea. Nuclear scientists were commonly forced to work with only tiny quantities of radioactive material, which would be very difficult to see using standard techniques of chemical analysis. But every single atom of a radioisotope advertised its presence when it decayed, since the radiation could be detected with a Geiger counter. So, if a... 

Phosphorus-32, for example, produced by irradiating sulphur or natural phosphorus ( P) with high-energy particles, has a half-life of 14.8 days and can be rapidly taken up (in the form of phosphate) by body tissues such as muscles, the liver, bones, and teeth. De Hevesy found that different phosphorus compounds would be incorporated in a tissue-specific manner certain compounds were concentrated in the liver, for example. One can use stable isotopes as biological tracers too, since they are detectable atom by atom using mass spectrometry. De Hevesy observed that it takes deuterium twenty-six minutes to pass from ingested heavy water into urine. 

H. Levi, George de Hevesy Life and Work, Hilger, Bristol, 1985. 

G. Marx, ed., George de Hevesy 1885-1966, Festschrift, Akademia Kiado, Budapest, 1988. 

A. Pais, Niels Bohr s Times, in Physics, Philosophy, and Polity (Oxford, 1991), 204-10 H. Levi, George de Hevesy Life and Work (Bristol, 1985), 51-56. 

Also written as Georg Karl von Hevesy, Georg Hevesy, George Charles de Hevesy, George de Hevesy, George Hevesy... 

There are a number of tracers that have been used to help understand chemical reactions and interactions. Historically, development of modem tracer methods began with the pioneering work of the Hungarian physical chemist, George Charles de Hevesy, in the early 1900s. De Hevesy s work focused on the use of radioactive tracers to study chemical processes, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1943. Radioactive tracers, also known as radioactive labels, are based on the use of a given radioisotope. However, it is important to note that there are also isotopic tracers (or isotopic labels). Isotopes are forms of a chemical element with different atomic mass, which have nuclei with the same atomic number (i.e. number of protons) but different numbers of neutrons. Examples include H, " C, and which are radioactive forms of stable elements... 

Application of radionuclides in life sciences is of the greatest importance, and the largest single user of radionuclides is nuclear medicine. Shortly after the discovery of Ra in 1898 by Marie Curie and its subsequent isolation from pitchblende in amounts of 0.1 to 1 g, the finding that this element was useful as a radiation source led to the first application of radionuclides in medicine. In 1921, de Hevesy investigated the metabolism of lead in plants by use of natural radioisotopes of Pb. 

In 1923 Dutch physicist Dirk Coster (1889—1950) and Hungarian chemist George Charles de Hevesy (1889—1966) found element 72 by X-ray analysis. The element was present in a piece of Norwegian zircon. Zircon also contains the mineral zirconium. 

Dutch physicist Dirk Coster and Hungarian chemist George Charles de Hevesy rediscover hafnium and are generally recognized as discoverers of the element. 

In 1911 Ernest Rutherford asked a student, George de Hevesy, to separate a lead impurity from a decay product of uranium, radium-D. De Hevesy did not succeed in this task (we now know that radium-D is the radioactive isotope °Pb), but this failure gave rise to the idea of using radioactive isotopes as tracers of chemical processes. With Friedrich Paneth in Vieima in 1913, de Hevesy used °Pb to measure the solubifity of lead salts—the first appfication of an isotopic tracer technique. De Hevesy went... 

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