Edward Anders, a professor emeritus of chemistry at the University of Chicago who helped map the history of the solar system before dedicating his retirement to documenting the Holocaust, died June 1 at the age of 98.
Through his studies of meteorites, Anders made a series of pioneering contributions to the field of cosmochemistry—the science of the makeup of the stars, planets and what they can tell us about how the solar system formed.
Among other findings, he discovered that meteorites come from asteroids rather than the moon, and that many meteorites contain tiny grains that date back before the solar system formed. He also precisely quantified the abundances of elements in meteorites and the sun—measurements that today underwrite our picture of how the solar system and Earth itself came to be.
“Anders’ work made a profound impact in the field and opened new avenues of research that continue to be actively pursued today worldwide, as well as here in Chicago,” said Philipp Heck, senior director of research at the Field Museum and a part-time professor of geophysical sciences at UChicago. “His discovery of presolar stardust in the late 1980s, following a decades-long search, opened up an entirely new field of research and enabled scientists to study solid samples of stars in the laboratory for the first time. This inspired many, including myself, to enter the field of cosmochemistry.”
“The list of his contributions is truly remarkable,” said Prof. Andrew M. Davis, a fellow cosmochemist and colleague of Anders’ for many years. “Many of the cornerstones of the field today came out of Anders’ lab.”
Anders then retired and set about uncovering the fates of Jewish citizens in his Latvian hometown during the Holocaust, which he narrowly escaped.
‘For me, it was love at first sight’
Born Edward Alperovitch to a Jewish family in 1926, in Liepāja, Latvia, he was a teenager when World War II broke out.
When the Nazis occupied Latvia, Anders’s father was shot. But by a series of fictions, kindnesses and strokes of luck, Anders and his mother Erika managed to survive the executions that killed most of the Jewish population of Liepaja—in part by lying that Erika was an Aryan foundling raised by Jews, which would have made Anders and his brother only half Jewish.
Anders’s older brother George died of typhoid in 1944, but he and his mother managed to forge papers (in part thanks to Anders’s budding interest in chemistry) and flee. After the war, Anders enrolled in the United Nations’ temporary college for refugees, and then at the University of Munich. He also testified at the Nuremberg Trials, implicating the Nazi officers in charge of occupied Latvia, though the testimony was later removed from the record on a technicality.
He and his mother managed to get admitted to the United States, where they changed their surname and Anders enrolled at Columbia University to study chemistry. One day in class, a professor of his happened to bring along a handful of meteorites.
“For me, it was love at first sight,” Anders would later write. “Here were samples from far beyond the Earth's orbit, older than any rock on Earth, and you can get your hands on them. … I resolved then and there that I would work on meteorites at the earliest opportunity in my life.”
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Anders received his Ph.D in 1954. After a brief stay on the faculty of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he met his wife, in 1955 Anders moved to UChicago, where he would spend the rest of his career.
Anders, along with friend, colleague and frequent collaborator Prof. Robert Clayton, became the nucleus of an internationally known center of cosmochemistry at UChicago.
Anders specialized in making incredibly precise measurements of the chemical and isotopic makeup of meteorites. Among his first major contributions was to show in the early 1960s that meteorites come from asteroids—not from the moon or other debris—by examining the ratios of element isotopes they held.
Anders co-wrote reviews of the abundances of different elements in the sun and in meteorites that were foundational in the field and have been cited thousands of times. He also catalogued organic compounds found on meteorites, and his lab was tapped to run some of the first analyses on the moon rocks that came back on the Apollo missions.
(He was known to occasionally display a dry sense of humor; when his team announced they had found traces of gold in lunar samples in 1970, the New York Times quoted him as quipping that it was “far too small to finance the space program.”)
In one of his most influential contributions, Anders also showed that meteorites contain a record of the solar system as it was billions of years ago. With a series of painstaking experiments, his lab found that meteorites contain “presolar grains,” tiny nuggets of literal stardust that date back before the planets and even the sun itself formed. These grains might be in the form of silicon carbide, graphite, or even nanoscale diamonds.
“All rock you can get your hands on here on Earth has been melted and re-formed, sometimes many times,” explained Davis. “Anders showed that meteorites have these snapshots of the conditions eons ago—they can show you the processes in the dust and gas of the solar nebula before planets formed. That really led us to our modern understanding of the early days of the solar system.”
Heck mentioned another major insight: the recognition that the parent asteroid of the most common type of meteorites experienced a catastrophic collision approximately 500 million years ago, leading to its breakup in the asteroid belt. “Decades later, this insight contributed to the discovery of direct ejecta from this collision preserved in Earth’s sedimentary record as fossil meteorites,” he said.
In the 1980s, the theory that dinosaurs were wiped out by a massive meteor that hit the Earth began to gain scientific traction. Intrigued, Anders and collaborator Wendy Wolbach surveyed samples from rock dated to that time. They found an abundance of charcoal, suggesting massive wildfires may have swept the planet after the asteroid strike.
Anders’s lab and collaborators also conducted trips to several ancient impact craters in France and Canada to take samples and establish the makeup of the meteorites that had caused them.
A new quest
Anders was also known for his dedication to teaching general chemistry to undergraduate students; he received the university’s Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Award for undergraduate teaching and mentoring in 1973.
"He was motivated by this belief that at UChicago, his freshman classes might include a future Supreme Court justice," Anders's son George recalled. "If so, this would be his chance to introduce such students to the scientific way of thinking.”
He retired in 1991 as the Horace B. Horton Professor Emeritus of Chemistry and the Enrico Fermi Institute. He then turned his attention to documenting the identities and fates of his fellow Jewish neighbors in Liepāja, the vast majority of whom were murdered. Using censes and other sources, he created a database of about 7,000 Jews living in the city at the time of the war. He also spoke with many historians and documentarians about his experiences of the Holocaust, which in all took 25 members of his family.
Anders received NASA’s Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement, the V.M. Goldschmidt Medal, the J. Lawrence Smith Medal, the Frederick C. Leonard Medal, and the Newcomb Cleveland Prize, among many other professional honors.
He was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Geophysical Union, the American Astronomical Society, the Geochemical Society, the Royal Astronomical Society and the Meteoritical Society.
Anders was preceded in death by his wife Joan and brother George. He is survived by his two children, George (married to Betsy) and Nanci; five grandchildren (Sara, Amy, Emily, Leah, and Peter); and three great-grandchildren (Avery, Ezra, and Calvin).
