Magyar radiochemistGeorge de Hevesywill likely be the only somebody who has both win a Nobel Prize and evaporate two others in acid .
bear in 1885 , he find himself working in a lab in Nazi - occupied Denmark during World War II when the strange incident take aim berth .
" My piece of work was interrupted for only one solar day during the foe business of Denmark,“he wrote in typically understated spoken communication , as if the Nazis were mainly a bit of an annoyance .
" When , on the good morning of Denmark ’s job , I arrived in the research lab , I found Bohr worrying about Max von Laue ’s Nobel medal , which Laue had sent to Copenhagen for dependable - keeping . In Hitler ’s conglomerate it was almost a capital law-breaking to get off amber out of the nation , and , Laue ’s name being engrave into the medal , the breakthrough of this by the invading forces would have had very serious result for him . "
Hevesy suggested bury the medallion , but his fellow worker worried that even then it might be receive . He decided instead to dissolve it in acid .
" While the invading force exhibit in the street of Copenhagen , I was meddlesome dismiss Laue ’s and also James Frank ’s medallion . After the war , the gold was recovered and the Nobel Foundation generously presented Laue and Franck with new Nobel medals . "
Hevesy would winhis own Nobel Prize in 1944for " his work on the use of isotope as tracers in the written report of chemical substance summons " . As well as this , he did some interesting personal experiment . Rewind 33 years and Hevesy may have performed the first - ever tagging experiment in scientific history , using radioactive material .
In 1911 , Hevesy was staying in Manchester at a embarkment house , along with physicist Ernest Rutherford . He suspectedthat the landlady had been recycle nutrient right off of their own plates , and serving it back to them days later within new repast . What she was call off fresh goulash and hashish , he believed were last week ’s scraps .
At first , Hevesy lightly confronted her on the topic , suggesting that it might be nice to have some unfermented food for a change . She tell him that all the intellectual nourishment that she suffice was absolutely fresh . At this detail , he escalate the matter somewhat but spiking his own food for thought with radioactive fabric .
Hevesy hire a piece of pith from his plate and tote up some radioactive material , before letting the landlady take the plate away . A few days later , he returned to the repast board , this time carrying an electroscope , as a scientist always does when they signify business .
Using the electroscope , he proved that the hasheesh she had suffice up was radioactive . Unless she had her own atomic enigma going on in the kitchen , which is arguably worse , she was once and for all take on food from their plates and assist it back to them Clarence Shepard Day Jr. later .
Unfortunately , Hevesy did not write up his cogitation , and so can not claim that he was the first to do a tagging experiment . But I ’ll wager his heart and soul from then on was fresh .
