Heinz A. Lowenstam

Heinz Adolf Lowenstam (1912 to 1993) was a German-born Jewish-American paleoecologist celebrated for his discoveries in biomineralization, that living organisms manufacture substances such as the iron-containing mineral magnetite within their bodies, and for pioneering research on coral reefs and their influence on biologic processes in the geologic record. Born in Upper Silesia, he studied at Frankfurt and then at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, but a law passed one week before his thesis defense barred the award of doctorates to Jews, and in 1937 he emigrated with his wife Ilse to the United States. He took his PhD at the University of Chicago in 1939, worked for the Illinois State Geological Survey and the Illinois State Museum, and discovered a massive system of Silurian reefs stretching from the Ozark Mountains to Greenland, which he published openly instead of exploiting. He then joined Harold Urey's isotope geochemistry group in Chicago and in 1954 moved to the California Institute of Technology, where in 1961 he found biochemically precipitated magnetite in the radula teeth of chitons. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1980.