Kurt Mendelssohn

Kurt Alfred Georg Mendelssohn (7 January 190618 September 1980) was a German-born British medical physicist, elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1951.

Family life He was the only child of Ernst Moritz Mendelssohn and Elizabeth Ruprecht. Through his grandfather he was a great-great-grandson of Saul Mendelssohn, the younger brother of philosopher Moses Mendelssohn. This places him amongst the Mendelssohn family. Francis Simon and Heinrich Mendelssohn were his cousins. He married Jutte Zarniko, the sister of Barbara Zarniko, one of Franz Simon's students in 1932. When James Crowther married Franziska Zarniko in 1934, he became a brother-in-law of Mendelssohn.

Scientific career He received a doctorate in physics from the University of Berlin, having studied under Max Planck, Walther Nernst, Erwin Schrödinger, and Albert Einstein. Frederick Lindemann visited Berlin in 1930 to buy an improved hydrogen liquefier designed by Francis Simon. Mendelssohn was given the role of demonstrating the equipment. During these trials Lindemann tried to recruit Mendelssohn to join him in Oxford University. However, as Mendelssohn had just accepted a job in Breslau, he felt obliged to refuse. He was joining his cousin, Francis Simon, who had appointed Professor of Physical Chemistry at the University of Breslau. Nevertheless, Lindemann contacted him again in 1932 inviting him to the Clarendon Laboratory in Oxford to install a helium liquifier. This he did, and by the time he returned to Breslau in January 1933, he had a grant application to the Rockefeller Foundation to allow him to join the Clarendon Laboratory. In the end both he and Simon ended up receiving funding from Imperial Chemical Industries for research work at Oxford. Whilst the rising tide of German antisemitism provided the context for his reasons for moving, he was to discover that Lindemann's rivalry with Lord Rutherford and the Cavendish Laboratory, based at the University of Cambridge was influential in England. In China Now, 1969. The World of Walther Nernst, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973 (hbk); pbk edition, Macmillan, 1973; pbk edition, Plunkett Lake Press, 2019. Science and Western Domination, Thames & Hudson, 1976.