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Benjamin Elazari Volcani (4 January 1915 – 1 February 1999) discovered life in the Dead Sea and pioneered biological silicon research at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego. ==Biography== Benjamin Elazari Volcani was born January 4, 1915, in Ben Shemen, in what is now Israel, the son of Itzhak Elazari Volcani (1880–1955) and Sarah Krieger. His father, as a young Zionist in Lithuania, had studied agricultural economics, and agronomy before immigrating to Palestine in 1908, where he became a world leader in these fields. Itzhak Elazari Volcani is considered the founder of modern agriculture in Israel. The Volcani Institute of Agricultural Research is named for his father, Itzhak Elazari Volcani, as is Beit Elazari, a moshav in central Israel. As a teenager Benjamin Volcani wanted to become an actor, but as an undergraduate his interest was captured by biology. He received his master of science degree in microbiology from Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1936. That same year, he found that the Dead Sea, so called because it was thought to be too salty to sustain life, in fact supports several types of microorganisms now classified as halophilic archaea. Both his M.Sc. degree (1936) and Ph.D. (1940) were from the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. His Ph.D. thesis was the first ever written in Hebrew (“Studies of the Microflora of the Dead Sea”). His discovery of microorganisms in the Dead Sea was the focal point of his work from 1936 to 1945 and was the theme of his doctoral thesis. From 1939 to 1958 Volcani served on the staff of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovoth, Israel, and in 1948 he was appointed head of the Institute's Section of Microbiology. During the 1940s, he also spent time in the United States as a research fellow at the University of California, Berkeley; Hopkins Marine Station of Stanford University; the California Institute of Technology; and the University of Wisconsin. In March 1948, Volcani married Eleanor Susan Brownell Anthony "Toni" Solomons Jackson in New York City.〔Raymond, Marcius D., p. 64〕〔Jordan, 372〕〔Railsback, p. 175〕〔She was the daughter of Theodore Seixas Solomons (1870–1947) an explorer and early member of the Sierra Club and who helped discover and define the John Muir Trail; and Katherine Gray Church, the only daughter of Henry Seymour Church and Margaretta Josephine Gray.〕〔An unusually gifted student, Toni scored so high on intelligence tests that she was selected for a lifelong research project known as the Terman Genetic Studies of Genius. The study was started by Lewis Terman at Stanford University. After marrying and divorcing Benjamin O. Jackson, she began a relationship with Ed Ricketts in 1940 and became his common-law wife. Toni, who had attended the University of California, Los Angeles, later worked as a personal assistant for Pulitzer Prize–winning writer John Steinbeck and was the editor of ''The Log from the Sea of Cortez''. Beside Steinbeck, their circle of friends also included the writer and painter, Henry Miller and the mythologist, writer, and lecturer Joseph Campbell. She left Ricketts after the death of her daughter (by her first husband) Katherine Adele Jackson. She died on October 5, 1947 at the age of 12 of a brain tumor and only five months after the death of her father.〕 After their marriage, the couple settled in Israel. Volcani smuggled in a small field-radar unit in his baggage. His wife remembers walking to the market in Rehovot, about one mile (1.6 km) from their house, and diving into foxholes along the road when pairs of small two-seater Arab planes came over on bombing runs. They came in low, each dropping its bomb as it flew off. The first bomb of the war fell on the street in front of the Volcani’s house. Volcani and his wife had one child, Yanon Volcani,〔 born in Israel in January 1949. Yanon is a clinical psychologist practicing in San Diego, California. Volcani died on February 6, 1999 in La Jolla, California.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Benjamin Elazari Volcani」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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