`Otto Hahn` Biography - Nobel Prize Winner (1944)

Otto Hahn (8 March 1879 – 28 July 1968) was a German chemist. He received the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He is considered a pioneer in the field of radioactivity. Hahn was born in Frankfurt am Main and studied chemistry in Marburg and Munich. After receiving his Ph.D. in 1901 he worked initially at Marburg University then, from 1904, at London, from 1905 at McGill University in Montreal under Ernest Rutherford and from 1906 in Berlin. of professor at the newly founded Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institute for Chemistry in Berlin in 1912. In 1918, he, together with Lise Meitner, discovered the first long-lived isotope of protactinium. When Meitner fled Nazi Germany in 1938, he continued work with Fritz Strassmann on elucidating the outcome of the bombardment of uranium with thermal neutrons. He communicated his results to Meitner who, in collaboration with her nephew Otto Robert Frisch, correctly interpreted them as evidence of nuclear fission (a phrase coined by Frisch). Thus Otto Hahn is credited as having been the first person to split the atom. Once the idea of fission had been accepted, Hahn continued his experiments and demonstrated the huge amounts of energy that neutron-induced fission could produce, either for energy production or warfare. After World War II Hahn was among those German scientists put under surveillance by the Allied Alsos program who suspected him of working on the German nuclear energy project to develop an atomic bomb (his only connection was the discovery of fission, he did not work on the program). In 1945 Hahn was awarded the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, but at the awards ceremony the chairman of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry announced, "Professor Hahn has informed us that he is regrettably unable to attend this ceremony." He was being held prisoner by the British as part of Operation Epsilon, who were seeking information from him about the failed German effort to develop an atomic bomb. There was also considerable controversy from anti-Germans and anti-Nazis that he had downplayed the role of Lise Meitner, a former Jew and a woman, in their collaboration such that she was excluded in the credit and the Nobel Prize. Later few American Jewish historians considered her contributions to have been the greater and in a controversial survey of Nobel Prize winners conducted forty years later, Lise Meitner was voted the most deserving of those who had not received the award. In the post-war era Hahn became an advocate against the use of nuclear weapons, drafting the Mainau Declaration. Proposals were made at different times that each of elements 105 and 108 should be named Hahnium in Hahn's honour, but neither proposal found approval (see Element naming controversy). However, one of the world's few nuclear-powered merchant ships, Otto Hahn, was named in his honor.

LIST OF NOBEL PRIZE WINNERS IN CHEMISTRY PART II.

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