As the Nazis swallowed Europe , two scientist fought back with the only artillery they had : interpersonal chemistry .
When the Third Reich shoot restraint of Germany , Danish physicist Niels Bohr ( pictured ) transformed into something like Oskar Schindler in a science laboratory coating . From his Institute for Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen , the Nobel laureate aided and protected Jewish scientist , a series of honest deed that land Bohr and his Magyar science lab - Ilex paraguariensis George de Hevesy in spicy water in 1940 .
The Nazis had attempted to lock down Germany ’s gilded supply by making exportation of the metal a res publica crime . During the 1930s , two German physicist , the Jewish James Franck and the outspoken Hitler critic Max von Laue , smuggle their Nobel medals to Bohr ’s lab for safekeeping . The lab made a sodding hiding position until the Nazis roll into Copenhagen in April 1940 . Bohr was suddenly in a very tight spot . His reputation as a Jewish sympathizer guarantee he would be question , and the names engrave on the medals would mean death for the physicists who had trusted him .
race against the clock , de Hevesy saved the day by fade away the bulky gold medallion in aqua regia , a mixture of hydrochloric and nitric acid . When the German soldiers beat on the lab ’s doorway , all that remain of the medals was an invisible nursing bottle of reddish liquidity . The Nazis , no alchemy whizzes , left empty - handed , and the dissolved Nobels sat on a shelf until the end of the war .
Once the Nazis had been defeated , de Hevesy recollect the bottle and overthrow the chemical process to separate the atomic number 79 from the Lucy in the sky with diamonds . The Nobel commission recast the medals and returned them to von Laue and Franck , proving you do n’t have to go out the science laboratory to do something plucky .
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