Hessel de Vries

Hessel de Vries, was a Dutch physicist and professor at the University of Groningen who furthered the detection methods and applications of radiocarbon dating to a variety of sciences. The 1960 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Willard Libby for his radiocarbon-dating method, however De Vries was not a contender, since the prize is not awarded posthumously and Hessel de Vries died in Groningen in 1959 by suicide after murdering an analyst, Anneke Hoogeveen. He has been called "the unsung hero of radiocarbon dating" by Eric Willis, the first director of the radiocarbon-dating laboratory at the University of Cambridge. His other major area of research included studies of human color vision and hearing. De Vries became a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1956.