George de Hevesy (also spelled Georg von Hevesy) was born in Budapest, Hungary on August 1, 1885. He earned his PhD degree from the University of Freiburg im Breisgau in 1908. He traveled to England to study under world famous physicist Ernest Rutherford in 1910 and began working at the Vienna Institute of Radium Research in 1913, where he and Frederic Paneth conducted the first radioactive tracer experiment. de Hevesy's career was interrupted in 1915 when he was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian Army. After the end of the war, he worked briefly at the University of Budapest before traveling to Copenhagen, Denmark in 1920 to work with Neils Bohr. While in Copenhagen, de Hevesy and his colleague Dirk Coster discovered the element hafnium, and de Hevesy performed pioneering work with isotopic indicators and the clinical use of isotopes.

In 1930, de Hevesy traveled to the United States to take the position of Baker Lecturer at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. He returned to Copenhagen in 1934 and renewed his association with Neils Bohr's Institute, which he maintained until 1952. During his second stay in Denmark, de Hevesy demonstrated the formation of artificial radioactive isotopes and began studying the effect of radiation on living cells. In 1943, de Hevesy moved to Stockholm and began working with the Institute of Research in Organic Chemistry. In the same year, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on the use of isotopes as tracers in the study of chemical processes. de Hevesy died on July 5, 1966.