George de Hevesy
George de Hevesy was a
Hungarian chemist who, when the
Nazis invaded
Denmark, dissolved the gold Nobel Prizes of
Max von Laue and
James Franck into
aqua regia and placed this reagent on a shelf in his laboratory at the
Niels Bohr Institute.
After the
war, he returned to find the solution undisturbed and precipitated the gold out of the acid.