Joseph Joshua Weiss

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Joseph Joshua Weiss (also JJ Weiss ; born August 30, 1905 in Vienna , † April 9, 1972 in Newcastle upon Tyne) was an Austro-British chemist. He is considered a pioneer in radiochemistry and photochemistry . Together with his teacher Fritz Haber, Joseph Weiss discovered the Haber-Weiss reaction .

Life and activity

Weiss was a son of Sandort Simon Weiss and his wife Ernestine, b. Steinhardt. He grew up in Vienna and attended the federal secondary school, which he left in July 1923 with the final exam.

From 1923 to 1928 Weiss studied technical chemistry at the Technical University in Vienna. After the audit in July 1928, one of he Emil Abel at the Institute of Physical Chemistry at the Technical University of supervised work on oxidation to Dr. techn.

From 1928 to 1930 Weiss headed the chemical department of the Textile Institute in Sorau in Niederlausitz. He then moved to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry in Berlin as assistant to Fritz Haber .

Shortly after the National Socialists came to power in the spring of 1933, Weiss was dismissed from civil service due to his - according to National Socialist definition - Jewish descent on the basis of the law for the restoration of the civil service.

In the autumn of 1933 Weiss moved to Great Britain with Haber. He initially worked as a researcher at Cambridge University for a year . He then worked from 1934 to 1937 at University College in London. In 1937 he received his doctorate there with a work supervised by Frederick George Donnan - according to the British procedure - so that from then on he carried the degree of Doctor of Science .

In 1937 Weiss was accepted as a demonstrator in the chemistry department of King's College, Durham University . In 1939 he joined the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne as an assistant lecturer. There he was successively appointed Lecturer (1944), Reader (1948) and Professor of Radiochemistry (1956).

After the outbreak of World War II, Weiss was held in an internment camp from 1939 to 1940, as he was still a German citizen, as a member of an enemy power.

After his emigration, the National Socialist police officers classified Weiss as an enemy of the state: In the spring of 1940, the Reich Main Security Office in Berlin put him on the special wanted list GB , a list of people who would be succeeded by the occupying forces in the event of a successful invasion and occupation of the British Isles by the Wehrmacht Special SS commandos were to be identified and arrested with special priority.

In 1970 Weiss retired. In the same year he became a visiting professor at the Max Planck Institute for Coal Research in Mülheim an der Ruhr. During this three-year activity, he took over the leadership of a working group in the radiation chemistry department. The contract was terminated prematurely so that shortly before his death he was able to work at the Holt Radium Institute in Manchester for a few more months .

Weiss' main research areas were radiobiology, photochemistry and radiation chemistry, as well as dealing with the mechanism of chemical reactions in solutions. One of the topics he intensely researched was radiation damage to DNA. He has published numerous articles in journals such as Natural Sciences , Proceedings of the Royal Society , Transactions of the Faraday Society , Journal of Physical Chemistry , Journal of the Chemical Society, and Advances in Catalysis .

Honors

In 1968 he received an honorary doctorate from the Technical University of Berlin and in 1970 the Marie Curie Medal from the newly founded Institut Curie . After his death, the Association of Radiochemists donated the Weiss Medal in his honor .

family

In 1942 Weiss married Frances Sonia Lawson, with whom he had two sons and a daughter.

Fonts

  • Kinetics of oxidation by nitric acid. Oxidation of arsenic acid. , 1929. (Dissertation)

literature

  • Reinhard Rürup : Joseph Joshua Weiss. In: Ders .: Fates and Careers. Memorial book for the researchers expelled from the Kaiser Wilhelm Society by the National Socialists. Wallstein, 2008, pp. 353-355.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Entry on Weiss on the special wanted site GB (reproduced on the website of the Imperial War Museum in London) .
personal data
SURNAME Weiss, Joseph Joshua
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Weiss, JJ
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austro-British chemist and university professor
DATE OF BIRTH August 30, 1905
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH April 9, 1972
Place of death Newcastle upon Tyne