|
Clair Cameron Patterson (June 2, 1922 – December 5, 1995) was an American geochemist. Born in Mitchellville, Iowa, United States he graduated from Grinnell College. He later received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, and spent his entire professional career at the California Institute of Technology. In collaboration with George Tilton, Patterson developed the uranium-lead dating method into lead-lead dating, and by using lead isotopic data from the Canyon Diablo meteorite, he calculated an age for the Earth of 4.55 billion years; a figure far more accurate than those that existed at the time and one that has remained largely unchanged since 1956. Patterson had first encountered lead contamination in the late 1940s as a graduate student at the University of Chicago. His work on this led to a total re-evaluation of the growth in industrial lead concentrations in the atmosphere and the human body, and his subsequent campaigning was seminal in the banning of tetraethyllead in gasoline, and lead solder in food cans. ==Early life== Clair (Pat) Patterson was born in Mitchellville, Iowa and graduated from Grinnell College in chemistry where he met his wife to be, Lorna (Laurie) McCleary. They both moved to the University of Iowa for graduate work where he did an M.A. in molecular spectroscopy. Both were then sent to work on the Manhattan Project, first at the University of Chicago and then at Oak Ridge, Tennessee where he encountered mass spectrometry.〔(Biographical memoir by George R. Tilton )〕 After the war they returned to Chicago where Laurie took a research job as an infrared spectroscopist to support Pat whilst he did a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago under Harrison Brown. After a postdoctoral year at Chicago, Patterson moved with Brown to the Division of Geology (later the Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences) at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 1952 as founding members of its geochemistry program.〔(Interview with Shirley Cohen from the Caltech Oral History archives )〕 Pat remained at Caltech for the rest of his life. He and Laurie had four children.〔(Biographical Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) for Clair C. Patterson ) See p. 17.〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Clair Cameron Patterson」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|