Benjamin Elazari Volcani

Benjamin Elazari Volcani ( born January 4, 1915 in Ben- Shamen, Palestine, † February 6, 1999 in La Jolla ) was an Israeli microbiologist.

His father was an agricultural economist Ithzak Elazari - Volcani ( Isaac Wilkansky; 1880-1955 ), who immigrated from Latvia in 1908 to Palestine. Volcani studied microbiology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem with a Master 's degree in 1936 and his doctorate on the microflora of the Dead Sea 1940. Previously it had been assumed, the sea there is in the dead because of the high salt content, no life, but Volcani found Halophilic archaea. 1939 to 1958 he was at the Weizmann Institute, from 1948 as head of microbiology. In the 1940s he was abroad in Berkeley, Caltech, Stanford ( Hopkins Marine Station) and the University of Wisconsin.

Volcani was from 1959. At Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla and worked until 1985 professor of marine biology at the University of California, San Diego There he dealt primarily with the silicon metabolism of marine diatoms ( whose skeleton consists mainly of silicon dioxide) and biomineralization.

Works

• Silicon and siliceous structures in biological systems / ed by Tracy L. Simpson; Benjamin E. Volcani. International symposium ' Siliceous structures and silicon deposition in living organisms '; (Richmond / Va): 1978.12. New York [ ua]: Springer, 1981, ISBN 0-387-90592-8, ISBN 3-540-90592-8. .