The man who tricked Nazis and transformed medicine

John Hopton for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
In 1911, future Nobel Prize winner George de Hevesy was on the verge of two important breakthroughs. One would revolutionize medicine and enable doctors to look inside the human body like never before; the other would allow him to prove that his landlady was serving him yesterday’s leftovers for dinner.
The Hungarian genius had been set on a fool’s errand by the British, who asked him to separate radioactive and non-radioactive atoms in lead, which it later turned out was impossible to do through the chemical means. He spent two years on the project, frustrated at its lack of progress by day and compounded in his misery at night when he went back to a lonely boarding house where his sour-faced landlady served him stale food. His suspicion that she was recycling leftover meat was a particular gripe.

One night, de Hevesy brought his work home with him and secretly sprinkled some powder containing radioactive particles (along with the inseparable non-radioactive ones) on his meat. The next day, he tested his “fresh” dinner with a snazzy, newly designed radiation detector. Sure enough, traces from the powder made themselves known to the Geiger counter, and the landlady was caught red-handed. Many years later, he was awarded the famous and coveted Nobel Prize for meat (chemistry).
Not content with vanquishing his landlady, de Hevesy had more bad guys to take on. Two German scientists who hated the Nazis, James Frank and Max Born, had sent their Nobel Prize medals to Denmark for safekeeping. Hitler had made it illegal to export gold out of Germany, and with the Nazis having invaded Denmark the scientists were at risk of being found to have exported German gold – i.e. their medals. They faced execution.
But once again George, who was now working at Copenagen’s Niels Bohr Institute, had a trick up his sleeve, or rather in a jar of aqua regia; a caustic mix of nitric and hydrochloric acids. He dissolved the medals in the acid as the sound of Nazi jackboots approached. The institute was ransacked by the Nazis, but unsurprisingly a jar of aqua regia did not tickle their fancy and they left it untouched. De Hevesy fled to Stockholm, but returned to his lab after the war where the jar still stood on a shelf with the dissolved medals inside. The Nobel academy was able to recast the medals from the gold that de Hevesy had reconstituted, returning them to their rightful owners.
In 1943, while in Stockholm, de Hevesy had been awarded a Nobel Prize of his own. It would have been a sad and ironic end to a wonderful story if it had transpired that the Nobel academy had been into his Copenhagen lab, reconstituted Frank and Born’s old medals and given them to de Hevesy as a “fresh,” “new” one. But fortunately even in a world that made Nazis there are some happy endings.
The happiness did not end there. In the 21st century, three scientists who had continued de Hevesy’s progress examining the inside of the body through the use of tracers were awarded Nobel Prizes too. Some of the tracers came from jellyfish rather than lead, in the form of Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP), but the work started by Hevesy that helped us to look inside hearts, brains and other organs expanded, with Japanese chemist Osamu Shimumora, and Americans Martin Chalfie and Roger Tsien being awarded Nobel Prizes in 2008 for study done over many years.
For all the trials and tribulations he faced, de Hevesy’s only complaint was the day of lab work he missed while fleeing to Stockholm. An honest meal and undisturbed time in the lab – not too much to ask for a man who changed the course of medicine.
—–
Follow redOrbit on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest.