Jewish Recipients of the Priestley Medal

JINFO.ORG

Listed below are recipients of the Priestley Medal in Chemistry who were, or are, Jewish. The Priestley Medal is the American Chemical Society's most prestigious award.

Sir Ian Heilbron (1945)
H. I. Schlesinger (1959)
Max Tishler (1970)
Henry Gilman¹ (1977)
Melvin Calvin (1978)
Milton Harris (1980)
Herbert C. Brown (1981)
Frank Westheimer (1988)
Roald Hoffmann (1990)
Carl Djerassi (1992)
Ernest Eliel (1996)
Ronald Breslow (1999)
Allen Bard (2002)
George Olah² (2005)
Gabor Somorjai (2008)
Richard Zare (2010)

NOTES
1. See p. 111 of http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=5406&page=83.
2. George Olah's autobiographical memoirs, A Life of Magic Chemistry (Wiley Interscience, NY, 2001, p. 45), briefly describes the last months of World War II in Hungary. (It was during this period that the Nazis attempted to deport the Jewish population of Budapest.) He states "I do not want to relive here in any detail some of my very difficult, even horrifying, experiences of this period, hiding out the last months of the war in Budapest. Suffice it to say that my parents and I survived." That statement is the closest he comes to identifying himself as being Jewish. Nearly everything in the book is consistent with an upper middle class Hungarian Jewish background, with the exception of his attendance at the Gymnasium of the Piarist Fathers, a Roman Catholic teaching order. (It should be noted, however, that many of the parochial schools in Budapest had significant Jewish enrollments.) Further information has materialized as a result of the publication of an op-ed piece in the New York Times on the Holocaust in Hungary, written by Kati Marton ("A Town's Hidden Memory," 21 July 2002). This article resulted in a considerable amount of controversy and letters to the editor. One such letter by J. L. Jankovich of San Jose, CA, which was sent to the Times, but apparently not published, could previously be found at: http://hungaria.org/lists/lobby/admin/article.php?articleid=136. Concerning the German military occupation that began in the spring of 1944, it states: "Yet for months thereafter our Jewish classmates could still attend our Catholic high school and, after the interruptions of the 1944-45 winter, graduated there. (One of them, Mr. George Olah, now an American citizen, just received the Nobel prize a few years ago and went back to visit his old school with pride.)" See also Our Lives: Encounters of a Scientist, by István Hargittai (Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, 2004, p. 77).

QUESTIONS AND COMMENTS: CONTACT US
JEWS IN CHEMISTRY
JINFO HOME