Norman Horowitz (geneticist)

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Norman Harold Horowitz (March 19, 1915-June 1, 2005) was a geneticist at Caltech who achieved national fame as the scientist who devised experiments to determine whether life might exist on Mars. His experiments were carried out by the Viking Lander of 1976, the first U.S. mission to successfully land an unmanned probe on the surface of Mars.

Horowitz was a member of both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1965 he began work with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, serving for five years as chief of JPL’s bioscience section and as a member of the science teams for the Mariner and Viking missions to Mars. From 1977 to 1980, he was chairman of the biology division at Caltech.

Among advocates of space exploration, he was noted for his opposition to a space program centered on the use of human astronauts. Charlene Anderson recalls, "In personal discussions, he could be particularly vociferous on the topic of human versus robotic exploration. Norm argued that human exploration could only interfere with scientific exploration and confuse the public as to why we should explore space. In his view, science should drive the endeavor, not a lust for adventure."

[edit] Scientific Career

As a scientist, Horowitz is best known for his discovery and demonstration in 1944 that a metabolic pathway is a series of steps, each catalyzed by a single enzyme. Horowitz demonstrated that each step in the metabolism of arginine from its precursors depends on the intactness of a single gene. His discovery helped to clinch the case for George Beadle and Edward Tatum's one gene-one enzyme model.

[edit] Sources

  • Anderson, Charlene. In Memoriam: Norman Horowitz (1915-2005) The Planetary Society.
  • Horowitz, Norman H. "On the evolution of biochemical syntheses." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 31 (1945) 153–157.
  • Horowitz, Norman H. To Utopia and Back: The Search for Life in the Solar System. (New York: W. H. Freeman) 1986.
  • Horowitz, Norman H. "Man on Mars: a turnabout." Science 238: 10. 1987.
  • Metzenberg, Robert L. "Norman Harold Horowitz, 1915–2005." Genetics. Dec 2005 171(4): 1445–1448.