Harold Morowitz

(New York, USA 1927 – Virginia, 2016)

Biochemist and molecular biophysicist, scientific essayist and popularizer. He was a professor in the department of molecular biophysics and biochemistry at Yale and Clarence J. Robinson Professor of Biology and Natural Philosophy, Krasnow Institute, George Mason University, and Chairman Emeritus of the Science Board of the Santa Fe Institute. The research focus of his career has been the application of thermodynamics to living systems and the origin of life on Earth. He has made fundamental contributions to the fields of biophysics, biochemistry and molecular biology. In a departure from many other theories in this area, he suggested that life is generated through the operation of fundamental physical and chemical laws about the environment that existed immediately before the appearance of the first living organisms and linked the scientific concept of entropy with the origin of life. He was founding editor of Complexity magazine and a NASA consultant. As an essayist, he liked to explore the application of scientific principles to such events as the retention of heat in a freshly baked pizza, the physics of washing a load of laundry, homeopathy, admissions to American medical schools, the evolution of snakes, baking bagels, mixing a martini, and a cross-cultural analysis of bathroom habits.