Andrew Benson

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Andrew Benson (2007)

Andrew Alm Benson (born September 24, 1917 in Modesto , California - † January 16, 2015 in La Jolla , California) was an American biochemist. Together with Melvin Calvin and James Alan Bassham, he discovered the Calvin cycle of the photosynthetic metabolism of plants.

Benson's father was a country doctor with Swedish roots. Benson studied chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley with a bachelor's degree in 1939 (his teachers included Luis Walter Alvarez and Glenn T. Seaborg ) and received his PhD in organic chemistry from Caltech in 1942 with Carl Niemann . In 1942/43 he was an instructor at Berkeley, where he got into trouble because he was a conscientious objector. In 1944/45 he did research at Stanford University and in 1945/46 he was an assistant at Caltech. From 1946 to 1955 he was deputy director of the group for bio-organic chemistry at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory in Berkeley, where he discovered the Calvin cycle with Calvin and Bassham (also called the Calvin-Benson-Bassham cycle). In 1955 he became associate professor and later professor at Pennsylvania State University and from 1962 he was professor at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego . There he was chairman of the marine biology department from 1965 to 1970 and director of the physiology research laboratory from 1970 to 1977. In 1988 he retired.

He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences (1972), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1981) and the Norwegian Academy of Sciences (1984). In 1965 he received an honorary doctorate in Oslo (where he was already a Fulbright Lecturer at the Agricultural College near Oslo in 1951/52) and in 1986 at the University of Paris VI (Pierre et Marie Curie). In 1972 he received the Stephen Hales Award from the American Society for Plant Physiology and in 1962 the Lawrence Memorial Award.

He later dealt with the physiology of mangroves, trout and corals, surfactants in biological membranes, biochemistry of fats, arsenic metabolism, the use of radioisotopes and radiochromatography.

From 1977 he was advisor to the Cousteau Society and from 1975 advisor to the Australian Institute of Marine Science. From 1990 he was at the Marine Biotechnology Institute in Tokyo.

He has been married since 1971 and has two daughters.

Fonts

  • with Calvin: The dark reduction of photosynthesis, Science, Volume 105, 1947, pp. 648-649
  • with Calvin: The path of carbon in photosynthesis , Science, Volume 107, 1948, pp. 476-480
  • Paving the Path , Annual Review of Plant Biology, Volume 53, 2002, pp. 1-25 (autobiographical)

Individual evidence

  1. Birth and career dates Pamela Kalte u. a. American Men and Women of Science , Thomson Gale 2004
  2. This is also the title of a series of articles in J. Am. Chem. Soc. and other Calvin journals from the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s on the Calvin cycle, some with Benson.