Otto Hahn, OBE, ForMemRS [1] (8 March 1879 28 July 1968) was a German chemist and Nobel laureate,

, a pioneer in the fields of radioactivity and radiochemistry.[2] He is regarded as one of the most significant chemists of all times and especially as "the father of nuclear chemistry". Hahn was an opponent of Jewish persecution by the Nazi Party and after World War II he became a passionate campaigner against the use of nuclear energy as a weapon. He served as the last President of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society (KWG) in 1946 and as the founding President of the Max Planck Society (MPG) from 1948 to 1960. Considered by many to be a model for scholarly excellence and personal integrity, he became one of the most influential and revered citizens of the Federal Republic of Germany. Hahn was the youngest son of Heinrich Hahn (18451922), a prosperous glazier and entrepreneur ("Glasbau Hahn"), and Charlotte Hahn, ne Giese (18451905). Together with his brothers Karl, Heiner and Julius, Otto was raised in a sheltered environment. At the age of 15, he began to take a special interest in chemistry and carried out simple experiments in the laundry room of the family home. His father wanted Otto to study architecture, as he had built or acquired several residential and business properties, but Otto persuaded him that his ambition was to become an industrial chemist. In 1897, after taking his Abitur at the Klinger Oberrealschule in Frankfurt, Hahn began to study chemistry and mineralogy at the University of Marburg. His subsidiary subjects were physics and philosophy. Hahn joined the Students' Association of Natural Sciences and Medicine, a student fraternity and a forerunner of today's Nibelungia Fraternity. He spent his third and fourth semester studying under Adolf von Baeyer at the University of Munich. In 1901, Hahn received his doctorate in Marburg for a dissertation entitled On Bromine Derivates of Isoeugenol, a topic in classical organic chemistry. After completing his one year military service, the young chemist returned to the University of Marburg, where for two years he worked as assistant to his doctoral supervisor, Geheimrat Professor Theodor Zincke. In 1897, after taking his Abitur at the Klinger Oberrealschule in Frankfurt, Hahn began to study chemistry and mineralogy at the University of Marburg. His subsidiary subjects were physics and philosophy. Hahn joined the Students' Association of Natural Sciences and Medicine, a student fraternity and a forerunner of today's Nibelungia Fraternity. He spent his third and fourth semester studying under Adolf von Baeyer at the University of Munich. In 1901, Hahn received his doctorate in Marburg for a dissertation entitled On Bromine Derivates of Isoeugenol, a topic in classical organic chemistry. After completing his one year military service, the young chemist returned to the University of Marburg, where for two years he worked as assistant to his doctoral supervisor, Geheimrat Professor Theodor Zincke. Hahn's intention had been to work in industry. With this in mind, and also to improve his knowledge of English, he took up a post at University College London in 1904, working under

Sir William Ramsay, known for having discovered the inert gases. Here Hahn worked on radiochemistry, at that time a very new field. In 1905, in the course of his work with salts of radium, Hahn discovered a substance he called radiothorium (thorium-228), which at that time was believed to be a new radioactive element. (In fact, it was a still undiscovered isotope of the known element thorium. The term isotope was only coined in 1913, by the British chemist Frederick Soddy). From September 1905 until mid-1906, Hahn visited Montreal, Canada, where he worked under Ernest Rutherford in the McDonalds-Physics-Building at McGill University and discovered thorium C (later identified as polonium-212) and radioactinium (later identified as thorium-227) and investigated the alpha rays of radiothorium.[3] In 1906, Hahn returned to Germany, where he collaborated with Emil Fischer at the University of Berlin. Fischer placed at his disposal a former woodworking shop ("Holzwerkstatt") in the Chemical Institute to use as his own laboratory. There, in the space of a few months, using extremely primitive apparatus, Hahn discovered mesothorium I, mesothorium II and independently from Bertram Boltwood - the mother substance of radium, ionium. In subsequent years, mesothorium I (radium-228) assumed great importance because, like radium-226 (discovered by Pierre and Marie Curie), it was ideally suited for use in medical radiation treatment, while costing only half as much to manufacture. (In 1914, for the discovery of mesothorium I, Otto Hahn was first nominated for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry by Adolf von Baeyer). In June 1907, by means of the traditional habilitation thesis, Hahn qualified to teach at the University of Berlin. On 28 September 1907 he made the acquaintance of the young Austrian physicist Lise Meitner, who had transferred from Vienna to Berlin. So began the thirty-year collaboration and lifelong close friendship between the two scientists. After the physicist Harriet Brooks had observed a radioactive recoil in 1904, but interpreted it wrongly, Otto Hahn succeeded, in late 1908 and early 1909, in demonstrating the radioactive recoil incident to alpha particle emission and interpreting it correctly. "...a profoundly significant discovery in physics with far-reaching consequences", as the physicist Walther Gerlach put it. In 1910 Hahn was appointed professor, and in 1912 he became head of the Radioactivity Department of the newly founded Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry in Berlin-Dahlem (since 1956 "Otto Hahn Building of the Free University", Berlin, Thielallee 63). Succeeding Alfred Stock, Hahn was director of the institute from 1928 to 1946. In 1924, Hahn was elected to full membership of the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin (proposed by Albert Einstein, Max Planck, Fritz Haber, Wilhelm Schlenk and Max von Laue). In June 1911, while attending a conference in Stettin (today Szczecin, Poland) Otto Hahn met Edith Junghans (18871968), an art student. On 22 March 1913 the couple married in Edith's native city of Stettin, where her father, Paul Ferdinand Junghans, was a high-ranking law officer and President of the City Parliament until his 1915 death. Their only child, Hanno, born in 1922,

became a distinguished art historian and architectural researcher (at the Hertziana in Rome). In 1960, while on a study trip in France, Dr Hanno Hahn was involved in a fatal car accident, together with his wife and assistant Ilse Hahn, ne Pletz. They left a fourteen-year-old son, Dietrich. In 1990, the Hanno and Ilse Hahn Prize for outstanding contributions to Italian art history was established in memory of Hanno and Ilse Hahn to support young and talented art historians. It is awarded biennially by the Bibliotheca Hertziana - Max Planck Institute of Art History in Rome. During the First World War, Hahn was conscripted into the army, where he was assigned, together with James Franck and Gustav Hertz, to the special unit for chemical warfare under the direction of Fritz Haber. The unit developed, tested and produced poison gas for military purposes, and was sent to both the western and eastern front lines. In December 1916, Hahn was transferred to the "Headquarters of His Majesty" in Berlin, and was able to resume his radiochemical research in his institute. In 1917/18 Hahn and Lise Meitner isolated a long-lived activity, which they named "proto-actinium". Already in 1913, Kazimierz Fajans and Ghring had isolated a short-lived activity from uranium X2 (later known as 234mPa) and called the substance "brevium". The two activities were different isotopes of the same undiscovered element no. 91. In 1949, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) named this new element protactinium and confirmed Hahn and Meitner as discoverers. In February 1921, Otto Hahn published the first report on his discovery of uranium Z (later known as 234Pa ),[4] the first example of nuclear isomerism. "...a discovery that was not understood at the time but later became highly significant for nuclear physics", as Walther Gerlach remarked. And, indeed, it was not until 1936 that the young physicist Carl Friedrich von Weizscker succeeded in providing a theoretical explanation of the phenomenon of nuclear isomerism. For this discovery, whose full significance was recognized by very few, Hahn was again proposed, in 1923, for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, this time by Max Planck, among others.