Benjamin Elazari Volcani
Benjamin Elazari Volcani (born January 4, 1915 in Ben Shemen , Palestine , † February 6, 1999 in La Jolla ) was an Israeli microbiologist .
His father was the agricultural economist Ithzak Elazari-Volcani (Isaak Wilkansky; 1880–1955), who immigrated from Latvia to Palestine in 1908 and built an agricultural research station on what is now Ben Shemen, acquired by the Jewish National Fund ( JNF ) in 1905 . "During this time, JNF-KKL set up an agricultural research station in Ben Shemen under the direction of Yitzhak Wilkansky, whose work with mixed crops or plant diversification forms the basis of most of Israeli agriculture to this day."
Volcani studied microbiology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem with a master's degree in 1936 and a doctorate on the microflora of the Dead Sea in 1940. It had previously been assumed that there was no life in the Dead Sea because of the high salt content, but Volcani found halophilic archaea . From 1939 to 1958 he was at the Weizmann Institute , from 1948 as head of microbiology. In the 1940s he was abroad at Berkeley, Caltech , Stanford ( Hopkins Marine Station ) and the University of Wisconsin.
Volcani worked from 1959 at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla and until 1985 Professor of Marine Biology at the University of California, San Diego . There he mainly dealt with the silicon metabolism of marine diatoms (the skeleton of which consists mainly of silicon dioxide) and biomineralization.
Works
- Silicon and siliceous structures in biological systems / ed. By Tracy L. Simpson; Benjamin E. Volcani. International symposium 'Siliceous structures and silicon deposition in living organisms'; (Richmond / Va): 1978.12. New York [u. a.]: Springer, 1981. ISBN 0-387-90592-8 , ISBN 3-540-90592-8 .
Web links
- Aharon Oren & Antonio Ventosa: Benjamin Elazari Volcani (1915–1999): Sixty – three years of studies of the microbiology of the Dead Sea (PDF file; 53 kB)
- University of California, In Memoriam, 2000
- Benjamin Elazari Volcani, The American Society for Cell Biology ( Memento July 15, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
Individual evidence
- ^ Jewish National Fund: Our History . "It was also during this period that JNF-KKL set up an experimental agricultural station at Ben Shemen under the direction of Yitzhak Wilkansky, whose work in mixed farming, or crop diversification, remains the basis of most Israeli agriculture to this day." More on Yitzhak Wilkansky: The Collective Agricultural Settlements in Palestine
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Volcani, Benjamin Elazari |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Israeli microbiologist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | January 4, 1915 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Ben Shemen , Palestine |
| DATE OF DEATH | February 6, 1999 |
| Place of death | La Jolla |