R.I.P. Philip Abelson

Every scientist of a certain age knows the name of Philip Abelson, who died last week at the age of 91. Earth scientists have their own special reasons for remembering him.

Abelson created the first artificial element, neptunium, in 1940 and soon thereafter became a major player in the Manhattan Project, which designed and built the first atomic bomb and nuclear reactor. Almost as an afterthought, he sketched out the design for the first nuclear-powered submarine.

Later he pushed the frontiers in geology, discovering that organic compounds could survive in ancient rocks. That may qualify him as the father of biogeochemistry. When the National Academy of Science elected him to membership in 1959, he declared himself a geologist. (That was like Benjamin Franklin calling himself merely a printer.)

But he became familiar to every scientist as the editor of the AAAS Journal, better known as Science, from 1962 to 1985. Under his direction Science became the undisputed flagship of American scientific journals, as it remains to this day. Under his editorship Science published many of the groundbreaking papers that laid out plate tectonics.

A 2002 article in the magazine Living Longer featured Abelson's tips for maintaining his famous productivity into his eighties.