Harold Urey

Samuel Urey taught school and preached for the Church of the Brethren, and he was dead of tuberculosis before his son turned seven. The family went back to Indiana to live with a widowed grandmother. Harold finished an Amish grade school at 14, got through high school in Kendallville, took a teacher's certificate from Earlham College in 1911, and spent the next three years in small country schoolhouses — first in Indiana, then in Montana, where his mother had moved. He entered the University of Montana at Missoula in the autumn of 1914, 21 years old and a freshman, and took his degree in zoology. Chemistry came later, and only because Montana hired him back to teach it.

Three careers, and no obvious line between them. In 1931 he found deuterium, the heavy isotope of hydrogen, working with George Murphy at Columbia and Ferdinand Brickwedde in Washington. The paper ran in 1932 and the Nobel Prize in Chemistry followed in 1934. In the war he ran the Substitute Alloy Materials Laboratories at Columbia, the effort to separate the isotopes of uranium. Afterward he helped build the field of cosmochemistry, and coined the word. Most scientists are remembered for one result. His third is the one most people have heard of without knowing whose name is on it.

By the end of 1943 more than 700 people worked under him on separating the isotopes of uranium. He left in February 1945, worn out, and Groves gave him the Medal for Merit anyway. That May he had gone with Leo Szilard to press James F. Byrnes against dropping the weapon on a Japanese city without warning. Byrnes was unmoved. Urey spent the next decade arguing for civilian and international control of atomic energy. The FBI investigated him. The House Committee on Un-American Activities called him in. And he told Truman, and then Eisenhower, that David Greenglass could not have carried the physics he was said to have carried, and that the case against Ethel Rosenberg rested on nothing else. Both Rosenbergs were executed in June 1953.

He spent the rest of his life reading temperatures off old shells and asking where life came from. Oxygen isotopes in a carbonate record the water temperature it formed in — he worked that out, then read four summers and winters off a 100-million-year-old belemnite. In 1952 his graduate student Stanley Miller sparked a flask of methane, ammonia, hydrogen and water, and amino acids came out. The atmosphere they assumed is no longer thought to be the early Earth's. The experiment is still the founding one in its field. In 1969 he examined the first Apollo rocks. He died in La Jolla on January 5, 1981. A lunar crater, an asteroid and a planetary-science prize carry his name.

Harold Urey's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Atoms, Quanta and Molecules book
  With Arthur Ruark — one of the first English texts bringing quantum mechanics to chemists 1930
• Discovery of deuterium discovery
  Heavy hydrogen, found at Columbia with George Murphy and Ferdinand Brickwedde 1931
• The oxygen-isotope palaeothermometer discovery
  A way to read the temperature of an ancient ocean out of fossil carbonate 1951
• The Planets: Their Origin and Development book
  The book that opened cosmochemistry 1952
• Miller-Urey experiment discovery
  Run by his graduate student Stanley Miller — amino acids out of simple gases and a spark 1953

• April 29, 1893 aged 0 Born in Walkerton, Indiana His father, a schoolteacher and Church of the Brethren minister, was dead of tuberculosis by the time Harold was six.
• 1914 aged ~21 Enters the University of Montana at Missoula, a 21-year-old freshman He had taught for three years in country schoolhouses in Indiana and Montana on a certificate from Earlham College.
• 1923 aged ~30 Takes a PhD at Berkeley under Gilbert N. Lewis, then sails for Copenhagen A fellowship from the American-Scandinavian Foundation put him in Niels Bohr's institute.
• 1931 aged ~38 Finds deuterium The paper with Murphy and Brickwedde ran in Physical Review the following year.
• 1934 aged ~41 Awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of heavy hydrogen He skipped the Stockholm ceremony to be present at the birth of his daughter Mary Alice.
• May 1943 aged 50 Takes charge of the Substitute Alloy Materials Laboratories at Columbia By the end of the year more than 700 people worked under him on separating the isotopes of uranium.
• February 1945 aged 51 Leaves the Manhattan Project, worn out He handed the laboratories to R. H. Crist and never worked on weapons again.
• June 19, 1953 aged 60 The Rosenbergs are executed after his appeals to Truman and Eisenhower He argued that David Greenglass could not have carried the physics he was said to have carried, and that the case against Ethel rested on nothing else.
• January 5, 1981 aged 87 Dies in La Jolla, California Buried at Fairfield Cemetery in DeKalb County, Indiana.

• Leo Szilard 1898–1964
  Conceived the nuclear chain reaction, started the American bomb program, then petitioned against using it allied with
• Enrico Fermi 1901–1954
  Italian-American physicist who built the first nuclear reactor and won the Nobel Prize in Physics. helped find work in America
• J. Robert Oppenheimer 1904–1967
  Theoretical physicist who led the Manhattan Project and became known as the father of the atomic bomb. worked with
• Ethel Rosenberg 1915–1953
  Executed in 1953 for conspiracy to commit espionage, on testimony her brother later recanted. defended
• Julius Rosenberg 1918–1953
  Ran a Soviet spy ring and was executed for espionage in 1953 defended
• Carl Sagan 1934–1996
  Astronomer and science communicator who brought cosmology to millions through Cosmos and popular books. influenced