The Creative Drive Gives Out

Early in 1943, George De Hevesy (1885-1966) was nominated for the Nobel Prize by Luigi Rolla, the only nomination received by the Nobel Foundation that year. When, in 1945 the Nobel Commission awarded the prize retroactively (due to World War II), it was based on the only nomination that De Hevesy had received in 1943, that is, Rolla s. 

On 1 January 1948, Rolla s older brother (by 10 years), a lawyer, passed away. In the same year, a communication from the lUPAC Inorganic Chemistry Nomenclature Committee served to open an old wound [172]. W. Conard Femelius (1905-86), Chair of the Committee, and Charles CoryeU of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology consulted RoIIa regarding the tricky issue of naming element 61. This query was not an obligatory act of courtesy but a clumsy attempt to neutralize the interference of another discoverer, B. Smith Hopkins. A year before, the actual discoverers, Marinsky, Glendenin, and Coryell on one hand, and the physicists Marion L. Pool (1900-82) and Lawrence Larkin QuiU (1901-89) on the other, had submitted a series of proposals on how to name it. 

Fontani M, Costa M (2010) Allievi di un ingombrante maestro Mario Betti e Adriano Ostrogovich. La Chimica e I lndustiia 6 116 

Saccardi P (1969) Typed manuscript held at the department of chemistry Ugo SchifF . University of Florence cataloguing in process 

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