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Politics : Rat's Nest - Chronicles of Collapse -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (10264)	4/13/2010 2:19:42 PM
From: Wharf Rat	Respond to of 24226

The first college prof I ever had a lecture from...Chem 1A..Sept. '62 Melvin Calvin and Photosynthesis On September 2, 1945, World War II ended with the Japanese surrender. That day, Ernest Lawrence, Director of UC Berkeley's Radiation Laboratory, suggested to chemistry professor and "Rad Lab" researcher Melvin Calvin that "now is the time to do something useful with radioactive carbon." That nudge eventually led Calvin to uncover the secrets of how plants capture energy from the sun. The research earned Calvin the 1961 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. By the 1930s, scientists were aware that plants took in carbon dioxide and water and released oxygen. That decade, radioactive isotopes were first used as "tags" to trace organic molecules through chemical processes. However, the first radioisotope tracers decayed too quickly to make it through the full photosynthesis reaction. Using the newly-discovered Carbon 14 as a tracer though, Calvin and his colleagues followed the entire path of carbon through photosynthesis. From the absorption of atmospheric carbon dioxide to its sunlight-fueled conversion via chlorophyll into carbohydrates and other compounds, the researchers shed light on the whole photosynthesis question. That work eventually sparked the US Department of Energy's research into solar energy as a renewable power source. Green algae, grown in continuous cultures, were placed in the "lollipop" with the light shining on them. Carbon-14 labeled CO2 was injected into the stream of nonradioactive CO2 for a suitable period, at the end of which the algae were killed. The compounds into which the radioactive carbon had entered were analyzed by paper chromatography. (courtesy Bancroft Library) "If you know how to make chemical or electrical energy out of solar energy the way plants do it – without going through a heat engine – that is certainly a trick," Calvin once said. "And I'm sure we can do it. It's just a question of how long it will take to solve the technical question." In the early 1960s, Calvin established Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Chemical Biodynamics division and directed it for two decades. Calvin's Merry-Go-Round Calvin also served on the President's Science Advisory Committee under both Presidents Kennedy and Johnson and was chairman of the Committee on Science and Public Policy at the National Academy of Sciences. He received the National Medal of Science from President George Bush in 1989. Melvin Calvin died in 1997, but the breakthroughs of Mr. Photosynthesis, as Time magazine nicknamed him, continue to illuminate biology's chemical underpinnings. sciencematters.berkeley.edu