Harold Clayton Urey (1893-1981)

Awarded the Prize “for his discovery of heavy hydrogen.”

American physical chemist. Urey was born in Walkerton, Indiana on April 29, 1893. He was educated at the universities of Montana, studied zoology at California where he obtained a Ph.D. in 1923. After a year at the Institute of Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen, he began his teaching career at Johns Hopkins in 1924. In 1929 he moved to Columbia University, remaining there until 1958 when he became Professor at the University of California at La Jolla. Urey died on January 5, 1981 in La Jolla, California.