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Acceptance of the 2000 V. M. Goldschmidt Award
Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta, Vol. 65, No. 6, pp. 1005–1006, 2001 Copyright © 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd Printed in the USA. All rights reserved 0016-7037/01 $20.00 ⫹ .00
Pergamon
PII S0016-7037(00)00608-6
Acceptance of the 2000 V. M. Goldschmidt Award GEOFFREY EGLINTON Department of Earth Sciences, University of Bristol, Bristol, BS8 1RJ, UK
I have much pleasure in accepting the Goldschmidt medal. It is a great honour. I feel that I receive it as a representative of the worldwide and growing community of organic geochemists and biogeochemists,ratherthanasanindividual.We‘softrock’geochemists work largely with low atomic number elements. I am sure that we are all very pleased that our ‘hard rock’, higher-atomic-number colleagues are indicating their approval of our work on organic compounds in nature through the award of this medal. Organic geochemists recognize Alfred Treibs (1899 –1983) as the founding father of the molecular approach to the carbon chemistry of the geosphere. Treibs did his Ph.D. at Munich under the great Hans Fischer, Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry. Treibs’ Habilitation thesis “Moleku¨lverbindungen der Porphyrine” was presented in 1930. He went on to lead a group of enthusiastic colleagues and students in detailed studies of the organic pigments they found in rocks, fossils, and petroleum. It became clear that organic compounds could not only survive deposition and diagenesis in sediments, but that their chemical structures could be rationally interpreted in terms of modification of probable biological precursors via reasonable decomposition reactions. For example, Treibs and his students were able to show how green, magnesium-containing chlorophyll molecules contributed by plants could proceed by a series of geochemical steps to give the red, vanadium- and nickel-containing DPE (deoxophylloerythrin) and etio porphyrins found in many petroleums. Thus was the field of molecular organic geochemistry born. Fifty years ago I trained as an organic chemist. Now, in the year 2000, I find that I am trying to use organic compounds to read the late Quaternary record of climate change in cores of marine sediment drilled from beneath the Atlantic Ocean off northwest Africa! How did this sea change come about? It goes back to chance events and encounters in my youth. As a student, I was drawn into Manchester University’s mountaineering club by the excitement of exploring the hills and mountains of Derbyshire and North Wales. Here, geology was self-evident all around and, fortunately, some of my fellow members were student geologists. A few were even professional academics—physicists, biologists, geographers and so on—who helped to explain the natural world further. I was duly impressed with how contacts across science can be as important as those within one’s own narrow chosen discipline. Thus, when caving in a famous lead mining region, we came across an extraordinary rubbery, smelly, oily material oozing out of a cliff. My more knowledgeable colleagues told me that this was the mineral ‘elaterite’, supposedly the result of hydrothermal activity, followed by polymerization. I hesitantly put a question to one of the chemistry lecturers back at the lab. “Could organic chemical analysis tell us what it was that had been heated up in the earth’s crust and had eventually become this deposit? If it had been plant material, would the elaterite not contain conversion products of the original chlorophyll pigments?” His answer was that I should first concentrate on finishing my B.Sc., continue on to do
a Ph.D. and then, at some time in the future worry about such questions! Well, in fact, this is exactly what I did. My Ph.D. study was in pure, synthetic organic chemistry, working on the synthesis of acetylenic compounds. This topic turned out to have quite some built-in excitement in the form of fires and explosions as we joined more and more carbon-carbon triple bonds together to make the highly unstable polyacetylenes. I followed that with a more peaceful year with Mel Newman at Ohio State University synthesising steroids and two years at Liverpool University trying— unsuccessfully—to determine the molecular structures of the yellow pigments of the ergot fungus. Then, in 1955, I set up an analytical facility in organic infrared spectroscopy at Glasgow University and settled down to apply a series of newly-emerging, powerful analytical techniques, particularly gas chromatography (GC) and mass spectrometry (MS), in the study of natural products. The complex mixtures of compounds making up the leaf waxes of plants provided one such challenge, forcibly put when the eminent retired biochemist Prof. Charles Chibnall offered his entire collection of crystallised leaf waxes, neatly packed into a stack of Wills Woodbine cigarette tins. Indeed, an enthusiastic research student, Dick Hamilton, and I devised a GCbased chemotaxonomic research project to look for evolutionary relationships in the carbon-number distributions of the long-chain components of leaf waxes. Where better to do it than in the wild barrancos of the geologically young Canary Islands, isolated, Galapagos-like, in the Atlantic off Africa? The legendary Fortunate Isles! In the event, our collaboration in 1005
1006
1960 with Prof. Gonzalez and his colleagues of the Universidad de La Laguna, proved to be both productive and fun. Although I had thought about it from time to time since my student days, I first started my quest for organic molecules in fossils and rocks back in 1963 during a leave of absence at Berkeley, California. My host, Nobel Laureate Melvin Calvin, gave me more or less free rein in a completely empty, brand new laboratory. He was wildly enthusiastic about going the ‘Full Monty’ right then, i.e. extracting Archean rocks for the earliest molecular signs of life on this planet. But the very hard, grey and black lumps of assorted cherts, limestones, shales and schists, which he had acquired from geological colleagues all over the world, did not look very promising! Indeed, trying a few of them gave virtually invisible amounts of extract. I wanted to start with recent sediments because there at least there should be plenty of recently-biosynthesised organic material, but in the end we settled for extracting the organic compounds from the Eocene Green River oil shale, a perceptive and timely suggestion from Bill Fyfe. Anyway, when sliced and polished, this shale made beautiful paperweights! This was the material on which my graduate student, Ted Belsky, and I cut our analytical teeth— using the then very new, state of the art, Aerograph gas chromatograph— dubbed ‘The Iron Nose’ and made just over the hill in Walnut Creek, followed by mass spectrometric identification by the resident expert, Al Burlingame, and his team. Work on the isoprenoids in this shale then gave us the confidence to jump a billion years back into the Precambrian and to find similar suites of compounds in the Nonesuch shale from the shores of Lake Superior. Four chemists have been my long-term, close colleagues. First at Glasgow, Charles Brooks and then at Bristol, James Maxwell, Colin Pillinger, and Ann Gowar. Our ‘minder’ and the Organic Geochemistry Unit’s ministering angel, Sue Trott, and our research instrumentalist, Jim Carter, made it all happen. Much of what was achieved in the laboratories at Bristol and Glasgow can be traced to their activities. The main credit, of course, for the bulk of the research work goes to the many graduate students, postdocs, and visiting scientists who enthusiastically joined in the game of ‘hunt the molecule’ in all sorts of complex materials. These include bacterial and algal cultures, algal mat deposits, soils, peat bogs, copepods, shrimps, feces, leaf waxes, aeolian dusts, lake and ocean sediments, coals and petroleums of disparate ages and maturities, various fossils, archeological finds and, of course, lunar samples. Much of this work was funded by the Natural Environment Research Council and between 1968 and 1998 led to around 80 Ph.D’s being granted at the Organic Geochemistry Unit in Bristol. Organic geochemists have always sought basic information. Just what happens to the molecules put together by living organisms when they enter the geosphere? This curiositydriven research has constituted for me a sort of laboratorybased voyage of the Beagle, documenting environmental and geoscience aspects of the carbon chemistry of the planet. But we have always kept in mind how newly-gleaned basic information might be applied in related fields and this has led to a number of molecularly-based proxies. Among these, the most well-known is probably the alkenone-based UK⬘ 37 index for palaeo-sea-surface temperatures (SST). It has been a source of great personal pleasure to see how this proxy, originally devised at Bristol by several of us, including Simon Brassell, Ian Marlowe, and John Volkman, has become widely used.
Acceptance of this Medal from The Geochemical Society reminds me of an earlier time when I joined another otherwise classical geochemical fraternity. This was the Lunar Sample Analysis Planning Team (with the delightful acronym LSAPT) at Houston early in 1969, just prior to the planned first manned lunar landing. This collection of rather eccentric prima donnas was chaired by an impressively large engineer, known as ‘Hoss Hess’. I soon realised that I was there because they needed someone to deal with some organic geochemical problem proposals for lunar materials—that is if we ever got any. In July 1969, the famous Apollo 11 sampling expedition took place and the collection of rocks and lunar soil duly entered the Lunar Receiving Laboratory at Houston. Behold, the material was at first sight rather black! Indeed, the mineralogist Cliff Frondel came rushing out of quarantine after his first view of the soil and grabbed me, exclaiming, “Well, you guys are OK—it must be full of carbon!” As expected, this optimistic view did not last. Detailed examination revealed a very low content of carbon, not at all promising for organic geochemical studies. But one US proposal wanted several hundred grams of soil in order to demineralise it in search of coal particles! When I recommended rejection, all hell broke loose on the socio-political front. Congressmen were on the phone bending the ears of the management, but my LSAPT colleagues stood firm and the fuss eventually died down. Incidentally, it was in the LSAPT trailer that I first learned from Bob Walker that the solar wind was not something afflicting one’s solar plexus but rather a stream of atoms and ions, mainly hydrogen, but also carbon and many other elements, which must surely implant into, and then react, in the lunar soil. Formation of methane within the grains seemed one logical end product and so it turned out when the Bristol team of young “tigers”—Paul Abell, Harry Draffan, John Hayes, James Maxwell and Colin Pillinger, got some soil for analysis. A little reflection to end with. As a working academic, my days were full of appointments, deadlines to meet, budgets to adjust, lectures and tutorials to give, committees to sit on, meetings to go to, books, articles, and theses to read, proposals, reports and papers to write. True, but thinking back now, it is clear to me what a fun time it was, even if we did not realise it then! Sure, we would have been happier with less of the dreaded validation and accountability so wastefully demanded now from the bureaucracy on high, but above all the key thing was the constant interaction with colleagues, students and co-workers. Even scientists—and, perhaps scientists more than most—are social animals. Indeed, since I “retired” in 1993 from the Chemistry Department at Bristol it has become apparent to me that the life of an itinerant medieval troubador must have been quite rewarding. With a base at the Biogeochemistry Centre in the earth sciences department at Bristol, I have sung successively of the charms of biomarkers at Norman, Oklahoma (Energy Center, Univ. Oklahoma), Hanover, New Hampshire (Dartmouth College), Woods Hole, Massachusetts (Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute), Kiel, Germany (Geology Department, Univ. Kiel) and most recently at Delmenhorst, Lower Saxony (Hanse Wissenshaftskolleg). My warmest thanks go to my hosts. Planning, doing, and talking about science is where it’s all at. It is really nice to get a medal for something you have enjoyed doing so much! Thank you, Geochemical Society and thank you, too, the many colleagues whose research work is being honoured today by this award.
Pergamon
PII S0016-7037(00)00608-6
Acceptance of the 2000 V. M. Goldschmidt Award GEOFFREY EGLINTON Department of Earth Sciences, University of Bristol, Bristol, BS8 1RJ, UK
I have much pleasure in accepting the Goldschmidt medal. It is a great honour. I feel that I receive it as a representative of the worldwide and growing community of organic geochemists and biogeochemists,ratherthanasanindividual.We‘softrock’geochemists work largely with low atomic number elements. I am sure that we are all very pleased that our ‘hard rock’, higher-atomic-number colleagues are indicating their approval of our work on organic compounds in nature through the award of this medal. Organic geochemists recognize Alfred Treibs (1899 –1983) as the founding father of the molecular approach to the carbon chemistry of the geosphere. Treibs did his Ph.D. at Munich under the great Hans Fischer, Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry. Treibs’ Habilitation thesis “Moleku¨lverbindungen der Porphyrine” was presented in 1930. He went on to lead a group of enthusiastic colleagues and students in detailed studies of the organic pigments they found in rocks, fossils, and petroleum. It became clear that organic compounds could not only survive deposition and diagenesis in sediments, but that their chemical structures could be rationally interpreted in terms of modification of probable biological precursors via reasonable decomposition reactions. For example, Treibs and his students were able to show how green, magnesium-containing chlorophyll molecules contributed by plants could proceed by a series of geochemical steps to give the red, vanadium- and nickel-containing DPE (deoxophylloerythrin) and etio porphyrins found in many petroleums. Thus was the field of molecular organic geochemistry born. Fifty years ago I trained as an organic chemist. Now, in the year 2000, I find that I am trying to use organic compounds to read the late Quaternary record of climate change in cores of marine sediment drilled from beneath the Atlantic Ocean off northwest Africa! How did this sea change come about? It goes back to chance events and encounters in my youth. As a student, I was drawn into Manchester University’s mountaineering club by the excitement of exploring the hills and mountains of Derbyshire and North Wales. Here, geology was self-evident all around and, fortunately, some of my fellow members were student geologists. A few were even professional academics—physicists, biologists, geographers and so on—who helped to explain the natural world further. I was duly impressed with how contacts across science can be as important as those within one’s own narrow chosen discipline. Thus, when caving in a famous lead mining region, we came across an extraordinary rubbery, smelly, oily material oozing out of a cliff. My more knowledgeable colleagues told me that this was the mineral ‘elaterite’, supposedly the result of hydrothermal activity, followed by polymerization. I hesitantly put a question to one of the chemistry lecturers back at the lab. “Could organic chemical analysis tell us what it was that had been heated up in the earth’s crust and had eventually become this deposit? If it had been plant material, would the elaterite not contain conversion products of the original chlorophyll pigments?” His answer was that I should first concentrate on finishing my B.Sc., continue on to do
a Ph.D. and then, at some time in the future worry about such questions! Well, in fact, this is exactly what I did. My Ph.D. study was in pure, synthetic organic chemistry, working on the synthesis of acetylenic compounds. This topic turned out to have quite some built-in excitement in the form of fires and explosions as we joined more and more carbon-carbon triple bonds together to make the highly unstable polyacetylenes. I followed that with a more peaceful year with Mel Newman at Ohio State University synthesising steroids and two years at Liverpool University trying— unsuccessfully—to determine the molecular structures of the yellow pigments of the ergot fungus. Then, in 1955, I set up an analytical facility in organic infrared spectroscopy at Glasgow University and settled down to apply a series of newly-emerging, powerful analytical techniques, particularly gas chromatography (GC) and mass spectrometry (MS), in the study of natural products. The complex mixtures of compounds making up the leaf waxes of plants provided one such challenge, forcibly put when the eminent retired biochemist Prof. Charles Chibnall offered his entire collection of crystallised leaf waxes, neatly packed into a stack of Wills Woodbine cigarette tins. Indeed, an enthusiastic research student, Dick Hamilton, and I devised a GCbased chemotaxonomic research project to look for evolutionary relationships in the carbon-number distributions of the long-chain components of leaf waxes. Where better to do it than in the wild barrancos of the geologically young Canary Islands, isolated, Galapagos-like, in the Atlantic off Africa? The legendary Fortunate Isles! In the event, our collaboration in 1005
1006
1960 with Prof. Gonzalez and his colleagues of the Universidad de La Laguna, proved to be both productive and fun. Although I had thought about it from time to time since my student days, I first started my quest for organic molecules in fossils and rocks back in 1963 during a leave of absence at Berkeley, California. My host, Nobel Laureate Melvin Calvin, gave me more or less free rein in a completely empty, brand new laboratory. He was wildly enthusiastic about going the ‘Full Monty’ right then, i.e. extracting Archean rocks for the earliest molecular signs of life on this planet. But the very hard, grey and black lumps of assorted cherts, limestones, shales and schists, which he had acquired from geological colleagues all over the world, did not look very promising! Indeed, trying a few of them gave virtually invisible amounts of extract. I wanted to start with recent sediments because there at least there should be plenty of recently-biosynthesised organic material, but in the end we settled for extracting the organic compounds from the Eocene Green River oil shale, a perceptive and timely suggestion from Bill Fyfe. Anyway, when sliced and polished, this shale made beautiful paperweights! This was the material on which my graduate student, Ted Belsky, and I cut our analytical teeth— using the then very new, state of the art, Aerograph gas chromatograph— dubbed ‘The Iron Nose’ and made just over the hill in Walnut Creek, followed by mass spectrometric identification by the resident expert, Al Burlingame, and his team. Work on the isoprenoids in this shale then gave us the confidence to jump a billion years back into the Precambrian and to find similar suites of compounds in the Nonesuch shale from the shores of Lake Superior. Four chemists have been my long-term, close colleagues. First at Glasgow, Charles Brooks and then at Bristol, James Maxwell, Colin Pillinger, and Ann Gowar. Our ‘minder’ and the Organic Geochemistry Unit’s ministering angel, Sue Trott, and our research instrumentalist, Jim Carter, made it all happen. Much of what was achieved in the laboratories at Bristol and Glasgow can be traced to their activities. The main credit, of course, for the bulk of the research work goes to the many graduate students, postdocs, and visiting scientists who enthusiastically joined in the game of ‘hunt the molecule’ in all sorts of complex materials. These include bacterial and algal cultures, algal mat deposits, soils, peat bogs, copepods, shrimps, feces, leaf waxes, aeolian dusts, lake and ocean sediments, coals and petroleums of disparate ages and maturities, various fossils, archeological finds and, of course, lunar samples. Much of this work was funded by the Natural Environment Research Council and between 1968 and 1998 led to around 80 Ph.D’s being granted at the Organic Geochemistry Unit in Bristol. Organic geochemists have always sought basic information. Just what happens to the molecules put together by living organisms when they enter the geosphere? This curiositydriven research has constituted for me a sort of laboratorybased voyage of the Beagle, documenting environmental and geoscience aspects of the carbon chemistry of the planet. But we have always kept in mind how newly-gleaned basic information might be applied in related fields and this has led to a number of molecularly-based proxies. Among these, the most well-known is probably the alkenone-based UK⬘ 37 index for palaeo-sea-surface temperatures (SST). It has been a source of great personal pleasure to see how this proxy, originally devised at Bristol by several of us, including Simon Brassell, Ian Marlowe, and John Volkman, has become widely used.
Acceptance of this Medal from The Geochemical Society reminds me of an earlier time when I joined another otherwise classical geochemical fraternity. This was the Lunar Sample Analysis Planning Team (with the delightful acronym LSAPT) at Houston early in 1969, just prior to the planned first manned lunar landing. This collection of rather eccentric prima donnas was chaired by an impressively large engineer, known as ‘Hoss Hess’. I soon realised that I was there because they needed someone to deal with some organic geochemical problem proposals for lunar materials—that is if we ever got any. In July 1969, the famous Apollo 11 sampling expedition took place and the collection of rocks and lunar soil duly entered the Lunar Receiving Laboratory at Houston. Behold, the material was at first sight rather black! Indeed, the mineralogist Cliff Frondel came rushing out of quarantine after his first view of the soil and grabbed me, exclaiming, “Well, you guys are OK—it must be full of carbon!” As expected, this optimistic view did not last. Detailed examination revealed a very low content of carbon, not at all promising for organic geochemical studies. But one US proposal wanted several hundred grams of soil in order to demineralise it in search of coal particles! When I recommended rejection, all hell broke loose on the socio-political front. Congressmen were on the phone bending the ears of the management, but my LSAPT colleagues stood firm and the fuss eventually died down. Incidentally, it was in the LSAPT trailer that I first learned from Bob Walker that the solar wind was not something afflicting one’s solar plexus but rather a stream of atoms and ions, mainly hydrogen, but also carbon and many other elements, which must surely implant into, and then react, in the lunar soil. Formation of methane within the grains seemed one logical end product and so it turned out when the Bristol team of young “tigers”—Paul Abell, Harry Draffan, John Hayes, James Maxwell and Colin Pillinger, got some soil for analysis. A little reflection to end with. As a working academic, my days were full of appointments, deadlines to meet, budgets to adjust, lectures and tutorials to give, committees to sit on, meetings to go to, books, articles, and theses to read, proposals, reports and papers to write. True, but thinking back now, it is clear to me what a fun time it was, even if we did not realise it then! Sure, we would have been happier with less of the dreaded validation and accountability so wastefully demanded now from the bureaucracy on high, but above all the key thing was the constant interaction with colleagues, students and co-workers. Even scientists—and, perhaps scientists more than most—are social animals. Indeed, since I “retired” in 1993 from the Chemistry Department at Bristol it has become apparent to me that the life of an itinerant medieval troubador must have been quite rewarding. With a base at the Biogeochemistry Centre in the earth sciences department at Bristol, I have sung successively of the charms of biomarkers at Norman, Oklahoma (Energy Center, Univ. Oklahoma), Hanover, New Hampshire (Dartmouth College), Woods Hole, Massachusetts (Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute), Kiel, Germany (Geology Department, Univ. Kiel) and most recently at Delmenhorst, Lower Saxony (Hanse Wissenshaftskolleg). My warmest thanks go to my hosts. Planning, doing, and talking about science is where it’s all at. It is really nice to get a medal for something you have enjoyed doing so much! Thank you, Geochemical Society and thank you, too, the many colleagues whose research work is being honoured today by this award.