Coming up next week is the Oscars of science, the Nobel Prizes. So I want to share one of my favorite

Nobel Prize stories ever. It involves the scientist George Heveshi. Heveshi was a bald man with droopy cheeks and a trim mustache.

He was born to an aristocratic Jewish family in Hungary in 1885.

He did work that straddled both chemistry and physics.

And as we'll see, straddling that line

ended up hurting his career.

Hevis she's not very well known today,

but I think that's a shame.

He should be.

Both for the incredible work he did,

and for pulling off some of the greatest stunts in science history.

One in particular involved international smuggling, some dastardly Nazis, and a disappearing

Nobel Prize. All that and more coming up next.

From the Science History Institute, this is Sam Keene and the Disappearing Spoon, a topsy-Turvy

sciency history podcast, where footnotes Become The Real Story.

In 1910, young George Heveshi arrived in Manchester, England to study the hottest field in science, radioactivity.

His lab director, Ernest Rutherford, immediately assigned Hevisia task involving a block of

lead. The lead was slightly radioactive. The source of that

radioactivity was an unknown substance inside the lead. Rutherford called

the substance Radium D. Rutherford wanted Heavichy to separate out all

the Radium D so that they could study it. The job was analogous to asking someone to take

a beaker of ocean water and to separate all the

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