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September 5, 2002

Media Contact: Kim McDonald (858) 534-7572; kimmcdonald@ucsd.edu
Photograph Credit: UCSD

FOUNDING CHEMIST AT UCSD, CO-DISCOVERER OF CARBON-14 DIES

Martin Kamen, an emeritus professor of chemistry at the University of California, San Diego and co-discoverer of carbon-14, an isotope he used and developed as a tracer atom in one of the most powerful and frequently used tools of modern science, died August 31 in Santa Barbara. He was 89.

For his achievements, Kamen was awarded in 1995 the Enrico Fermi Award, the federal government's oldest science and technology award.

"He was one of founding chemists here at UCSD," said Clifford Kubiak, chair of UCSD's Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. "And his work on carbon-14 changed biochemistry, biology and many other fields of science in a profound way."

Carbon-14 is used today to understand all biochemical reactions that involve carbon. Chemists, biologists, archaeologists, geologists and others use carbon-14 for applications as varied as dating archaeological finds to tracking carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Kamen discovered the long-lived radioisotope in 1940 in collaboration with the late Sam Ruben, a University of California, Berkeley chemist, while the two were working at the 60-inch cyclotron at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory.

Kamen later developed carbon-14 as a tracer in biological systems and used it in his own research to understand metabolism and photosynthesis. While he is best remembered as the co-discoverer of carbon-14, Kamen conducted groundbreaking research on the mechanisms of photosynthesis in bacteria and in the field of bacterial cytochromes. He and his colleagues established the general occurrence of heme compounds in all photosynthetic tissue and identified the physical and chemical structure of a large number of new cytochromes.

"In addition to his own contributions, Martin will be remembered by many of his colleagues for his influence on their own work," said George Feher, a professor of physics at UCSD and a founding member of the university's physics department. "Personally, I'm indebted to Martin for convincing me and my group to switch our own research from solid-state physics to bacterial photosynthesis in the late 1960s."

Kamen was born in 1913 in Toronto, Canada. He earned his bachelor's and doctoral degrees in chemistry and physical chemistry, respectively, from the University of Chicago. Kamen began his career as a radiochemist at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory in Berkeley. In 1945, he began work at the Washington University School of Medicine and became a professor of biochemistry at Brandeis University in 1957. In 1961, he became a chemistry professor at UCSD. He was one of six professors, all of them members of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences, who founded the chemistry department at UCSD.

"Roger Revelle had a vision for the UCSD campus as a place of world-class interdisciplinary research, where the best scientists in the world from different disciplines would work collaboratively on common problems, so he recruited world-renowned chemists like Harold Urey and Hans Suess and Martin, for his biochemical expertise," said Bruno Zimm, an emeritus professor of chemistry and biochemistry who was one of the founding chemists at UCSD. "One thing a lot of people didn't know about Martin was that he was also an accomplished violist. He played chamber music with world-class musicians while being a world-class chemist himself. He used to describe himself as being 'a fugitive from a musical career'."

Kamen also taught at the University of Southern California from the mid-1970s. He is survived by his son David of New York City and sister Lillian Smith of Chapel Hill, N.C.