Celebrating The Isotope

In a letter to the editor published in the Dec. 4, 1913, issue of Nature, English radiochemist Frederick Soddy proposed the isotope concept—that elements could have more than one atomic weight. The idea led to his 1921 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The notion of isotopes and the rest of Soddy’s lifetime body of work on radioactivity, the group displacement laws, the social responsibility of scientists, and the environment have had a profound effect on science and society. Soddy was born in Eastbourne, En­gland, on Sept. 2, 1877. His mother died when he was 18 months old, and he was raised by his half-sister in the Calvinist tradition, which imbued him with an exceptional sense of social independence. But he also acquired a critical attitude toward religion, which he later extended to social institutions in general. A precocious youth, he studied at Eastbourne College; Aberystwyth College of Wales; and Merton College, ...