 Rabi 's Molecular Beam Laboratory began to attract others , including Sidney Millman , a graduate student who studied lithium for his doctorate . Another was Jerrold Zacharias , who , believing that the sodium nucleus would be too difficult to understand , proposed studying the simplest of the elements , hydrogen . Its deuterium isotope had only recently been discovered at Columbia in 1931 by Urey , who received the 1934 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this work . Urey was able to supply them with both heavy water and gaseous deuterium for their experiments . Despite its simplicity , Stern 's group in Hamburg had observed that hydrogen did not behave as predicted . Urey also helped in another way ; he gave Rabi half his prize money to fund the Molecular Beam Laboratory . Other scientists whose careers began at the Molecular Beam Laboratory included Norman Ramsey , Julian Schwinger , Jerome Kellogg and Polykarp Kusch . All were men ; Rabi did not believe that women could be physicists . He never had a woman as a doctoral or postdoctoral student , and generally opposed women as candidates for faculty positions . 
