Scientific and Luminary Biography - Harold Urey

Harold Urey

Harold Urey was born in Walkerton, Indiana in April 1893. After briefly teaching in rural schools, Urey earned a degree in zoology from the University of Montana and a Ph.D. in chemistry, studying thermodynamics under Gilbert N. Lewis at the University of California at Berkeley.

At Berkeley, Urey was influenced by the work of physicist Raymond T. Birge and soon joined Niels Bohr in Copenhagen to work on atomic structure at the Institute for Theoretical Physics. On his return to the U.S. and between 1924 and 1928, he taught at The Johns Hopkins University, and then at Columbia where he assembled a team of associates that included Rudolph Schoenheimer, David Rittenberg.

Urey isolated deuterium by repeatedly distilling a sample of liquid hydrogen. In 1931, he and his associates went on to demonstrate the existence of heavy water. Urey was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1934 for this work.

During World War II, Urey's team at Columbia worked on a number of research programs that contributed towards the Manhattan Project to develop an atomic bomb for the United States. Most importantly, they developed the gaseous diffusion method to separate uranium-235 from uranium-238. In autumn 1941, Urey, with G. B. Pegram, led a diplomatic mission to England to establish co-operation on development of the atomic bomb.

After the war, Urey became professor of chemistry at the Institute for Nuclear Studies, then Ryerson professor of chemistry at the University of Chicago. Urey helped develop the field of cosmochemistry. His work on oxygen-18 led him to develop theories about the abundance of the chemical elements on earth and of their abundance and evolution in the stars. This work was among the pioneering paleoclimatic research. Urey summarized his work in the book The Planets: Their Origin and Development (1952). Urey speculated that the early terrestrial atmosphere was probably composed of ammonia, methane and hydrogen.

About the Argonne National Laboratory Named Postdoctoral Fellowship Program

Argonne offers these special postdoctoral fellowships to be awarded internationally on an annual basis to outstanding doctoral scientists and engineers who are at early points in promising careers. The fellowships are named after scientific and technical luminaries who have been associated with the laboratory, its predecessors and the University of Chicago since the 1940s. Read more about the program »

December 2012