Born  Walkerton, Indiana, USA, 29 April 1893
Died  San Diego County, California, USA, 5 January 1981
American chemist Harold C. Urey received the 1934 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his discovery of heavy hydrogen (deuterium), which proved to be of enormous importance in understanding both energy generation in the Sun and stars and conditions in the early Universe, where all the deuterium that exists today was produced. Astronomers also remember him for a definitive table of the abundances of the elements, compiled in collaboration with Hans Suess , which guided the modern understanding of nucleosynthesis in stars. (See William Fowler and Fred Hoyle.) In addition, Urey suggested a way of imitating atmospheric conditions of the early Earth with a laboratory experiment, carried out in 1953 by Stanley Miller (but called a Urey atmosphere experiment), which demonstrated that simple molecules like methane, ammonia, and water could form amino acids and other biologically...
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Selected References
Asimov, I. (1982). Biographical Encyclopedia of Science and Technology. 2nd ed. New York: Doubleday.
Doel, Ronald Edmund (1996). Solar System Astronomy in America: Communities, Patronage and Interdisciplinary Science, 1920–1960. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
James, L. K. (ed.) (1993). Nobel Laureates in Chemistry 1901–1992. Washington, DC: American Chemical Society, pp. 211–215
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Habashi, F. (2007). Urey, Harold Clayton. In: Hockey, T., et al. The Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-30400-7_1405
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