Elizabeth Rona

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Elizabeth Rona (born March 20, 1890 in Budapest , Austria-Hungary ; died July 27, 1981 in Oak Ridge , TN, USA) was a Hungarian-American chemist and nuclear physicist. She was involved in the discovery of radioactive tracers with Kasimir Fajans , George de Hevesy and Friedrich Adolf Paneth and coined this expression. Elizabeth Rona emigrated to the USA in 1941, where she produced polonium-210 for the Manhattan project . After World War II , she taught at the Oak Ridge Institute of Nuclear Studies and the Institute of Marine Sciences at the University of Miami.

Life and work

Elizabeth Rona was the daughter of the Hungarian doctor Samuel Rona and his wife Ida, née Mahler. Inspired by French doctors, her father dealt with the then still new radium therapy for skin diseases. It is believed that her father's interest in science contributed to her decision to study chemistry and physics. She began her studies in 1909 at the University of Budapest and received her PhD in 1916 (or 1912, 1911) with a thesis on bromine and the monohydric aliphatic alcohols.

First own research

After completing her studies, Elizabeth Rona went to the Technical University of Karlsruhe to Georg Bredig , the great in the field of physical chemistry at the time. In Karlsruhe, it was introduced to the study of radioactivity by the Polish physicist Kasimir Fajans , who had just announced the discovery of the pliads (later renamed isotopes by F. Soddy). After eight months she returned to the Chemical Institute in Budapest and published her first scientific paper, which deals with the diffusion constant of radon in water. George de Hevesy, who had returned from the Institute for Radium Research in Vienna and was working with Fritz Paneth on a marking method with radioactive substances to detect chemical reactions, was pleased to find a colleague in Rona who knew about radiochemical techniques. She was given the task of checking whether the element UY (now Th-231) discovered by G. N. Antonoff, which Frederick Soddy and A. Flecks could not detect, exists. She was able to verify the existence of the UY and Otto Hahn and F. Soddy later confirmed their results. In discussions during her collaboration with Hevesy, Elizabeth Rona coined the term "tracer". After Hevesy went back to Vienna, Rona taught chemistry at the Medical Faculty of Budapest University. She was the first woman to teach chemistry at a university in Hungary.

Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, Berlin and Institute for Radium Research, Vienna

In 1919 she brought Otto Hahn to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry in Berlin-Dahlem on a scholarship . There she was entrusted with the task of separating thorium-230 from uranium ores. After returning to Hungary, she initially worked in the textile industry until Stefan Meyer offered her a position as a research assistant at the Vienna Institute for Radium Research. Here she worked in the nuclear fragmentation group around the Swedish physicist and oceanographer Hans Pettersson (1888–1966). Rona's main task was the production of plutonium preparations, which is why she first went to the Institut Curie in Paris in 1926 to learn plutonium separation from Irène Curie . At the Vienna Radium Institute she also dealt with ionization by H-rays, polonium as a radiation source and the alpha radiation of actinium derivatives. For Hans Petterson, she was also supposed to examine samples of ocean sediments for their radium content. Since the radium background of the Radium Institute was too high for these investigations, she traveled to Sweden every summer for the following twelve years to carry out the investigations at the oceanographic station in Bornö. In 1933 she and Berta Karlik received the Haitinger Prize from the Austrian Academy of Science. After Austria was annexed to National Socialist Germany in 1938, the Jew Rona had to leave the country. She first returned to Budapest but then went to Sweden to complete her sediment exploration. She briefly got a job with Ellen Gleditsch in Oslo. After a last visit to Budapest, she left Europe forever in 1941 and emigrated to the USA.

emigration

Elizabeth Rona managed to get a job as a chemistry teacher at Trinity College in Washington DC. In addition, she was able to carry out studies on the uranium content of seawater at the Geophysical Institute of the Carnegie Institute. During World War II she was temporarily in Rochester, NY, where her knowledge of making Po-210 and Pb-210 for the Manhattan Project, acquired at the Curie Institute, was in demand. After leaving the Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago, where she worked from 1947 to 1950, Elizabeth Rona taught post-graduate students in the theory and methods of nuclear physics at the Oak Ridge Institute of Nuclear Studies . When she retired after 15 years, she returned to her earlier interests and dated marine sediments using the thorium-230 / protactinium-231 method. She got the opportunity through the mediation of Fritz Koczy, a former employee of Petterson in Gothenburg, and Karl Przibram (Radium Institute Vienna), who meanwhile worked at the Institute of Marine Science at the University of Miami. In 1970 Rona became Professor of Chemistry at the University of Miami, Florida, but returned to Oak Ridge, TN after retiring in 1976. Since she was never particularly communicative when it came to herself, she persuaded friends to write her bio. What emerged is a brief history of the radiotracer method , the protagonists of which were her companions and which she had also contributed to.

Elizabeth Rona reached the very old age of 91 for nuclear physicists of her generation. She always seems to have been aware of the danger of handling radioactive substances, because in the 1920s she asked Stefan Meyer to purchase gas masks for work. When he laughed at her, she bought two gas masks for herself. This anecdote shows the naivety of the time, even of the most experienced researchers, regarding the dangers of radioactive radiation.

literature

  • Brigitte Bishop: Rona, Elisabeth. In: Brigitta Keintzel, Ilse Korotin (ed.): Scientists in and from Austria. Life - work - work. Böhlau, Vienna / Cologne / Weimar 2002, ISBN 3-205-99467-1 , pp. 621–624.
  • Werner Röder; Herbert A. Strauss (Ed.): International Biographical Dictionary of Central European Emigrés 1933-1945 . Volume 2.2. Munich: Saur, 1983 ISBN 3-598-10089-2 , pp. 978f.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Daniela Angetter, Michael Martisching: Biographies of Austrian [physicists]. Edited by the Austrian State Archives. Pp. 120-123.
  2. ↑ a b c d Eva Vamos in European Women in Chemistry, Ed. Jan Apotheker, Livia Simon Sarkadi, Weinheim 2011, pp. 85–88.
  3. ↑ Wolfgang L. Reiter in Displaced Reason, Ed. Friedrich Stadler, Vienna-Munich 1987. pp. 718–720.
  4. ↑ Marshall Brucer: In Memoriam Elizabeth Rona (? 1891 -1981) . J Nuc Med, 23 No 1, 1981.
  5. ↑ Elizabeth Rona: How it came about: radioactivity, nuclear physics, atomic energy. ORAU-137, Oak Ridge, TN, 1978.
personal data
SURNAME Rona, Elizabeth
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Rona, Elisabeth
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Hungarian chemist and nuclear physicist
DATE OF BIRTH March 20, 1890
PLACE OF BIRTH Budapest
DATE OF DEATH July 27, 1981
Place of death Oak Ridge, Tennessee