Andrew Benson
| Andrew A. Benson | |
|---|---|
Andrew Benson
|
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| Born |
September 24, 1917 Modesto, California |
| Died | January 16, 2015 (aged 97) La Jolla, California |
| Fields | Biochemistry |
| Institutions | Scripps Institution of Oceanography |
| Notable awards | Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award (1962) |
Andrew Alm Benson (September 24, 1917 – January 16, 2015) was an American biologist and a professor of biology at the University of California, San Diego, until his retirement in 1989. He is known for his work in understanding the carbon cycle in plants.
Benson was born on September 24, 1917, in Modesto, California, the son of a rural physician of Swedish immigrant stock. He studied as an undergraduate and masters student at the University of California, Berkeley, where he learned optics from Luis Alvarez and worked in the chemistry lab of Glenn T. Seaborg. In 1942, he received his Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology; at Caltech, he worked under the supervision of Carl Niemann, conducting experiments on the fluorination of thyroxine; his later thesis work concerned “periodate and lead tetraacetate degradation of its vicinal amino glycol”. At that time he also became a conscientious objector to the war in Europe, a political position that caused difficulties for him when he moved back to Berkeley following his graduation.
Benson returned to Berkeley as an instructor in July 1942. In May 1946 he was invited to join the group of Melvin Calvin, who was then starting a photosynthesis group in Berkeley's Old Radiation Laboratory, a building that had previously housed a 37-inch cyclotron built in 1937 by Ernest Lawrence. He visited Norway from 1951 to 1952 on a Fulbright fellowship to the Norwegian College of Agriculture, and took a faculty position at Pennsylvania State University in 1954. He moved to UCSD from a previous position at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1962.
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