Friedrich (Fritz) Paneth was born as son of the physiologist
Joseph Paneth. He and his three brothers were brought up in Protestant faith although both parents were of Jewish descent. He was educated at the
Schottengymnasium a renowned school in Vienna. He studied chemistry at the
University of Vienna and after working with
Adolf von Baeyer at the
University of Munich he received his PhD with
Zdenko Hans Skraup at the organic chemistry department of the University of Vienna in 1910. He abandoned organic chemistry and in 1912 joined the
Institute for Radium Research, Vienna radiochemistry group of
Stefan Meyer. In 1913 he visited
Frederick Soddy at the
University of Glasgow and
Ernest Rutherford at the
University of Manchester. In this year he married Else Hartmann; they had a son and daughter. After his
habilitation in 1913 he became assistant of
Otto Hönigschmid at the
University of Prague. From 1919 till 1933 he was professor in various German universities:(
University of Hamburg 1919,
Berlin University 1922,
Königsberg University 1929. In 1927, Paneth and
Kurt Peters published his results on the transformation of
hydrogen to
helium, now known as
cold fusion. They later retracted the results, saying they had measured background helium from the air. During
Hitler's
Machtergreifung in 1933 he was on a lecture tour in England and did not return to Germany. In 1939 he became professor at the
University of Durham where he stayed until his retirement in 1953. A call to become director at the
Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in
Mainz caused him to return to Germany. He founded the Department of
Cosmochemistry there and initiated research on meteorites. He worked in the Institute until his death in 1958. == Career summary ==