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Edward Anders, Who Duped Nazis and Illuminated the Cosmos, Dies at 98
Edward Anders, a cosmochemist who unraveled mysteries about the solar system and the wildfires that helped wipe out the dinosaurs — and who then, in retirement, uncovered the identities of thousands of Jews from his hometown who were killed in the Holocaust — died on June 1 in San Mateo, Calif. He was 98.
His death, in an assisted living facility, was confirmed by his son, George.
Professor Anders emigrated to the United States in 1949, a few months after being called to testify at the Nuremberg trials about Nazi brutality in Liepaja, Latvia, in 1941 — events that he and his mother survived after she tricked soldiers into believing that she was of Aryan descent. His father wasn't as fortunate.
Settling in New York City, Edward enrolled at Columbia University and studied chemistry. One day, his professor — a curator at the American Museum of Natural History — brought a handful of meteorite rocks to pass around in class.
'I found them tremendously exciting,' Professor Anders said in a 2001 interview with the journal Meteoritics & Planetary Science. 'I would even use the word romantic. Here were samples from far beyond the Earth's orbit, older than any rock on Earth, and you can get your hands on them, and even do respectable research on them.'
Professor Anders's research turned out to be more than merely respectable. At the University of Chicago, his academic home for more than 30 years beginning in 1955, he conducted a series of groundbreaking studies into the early history of the solar system.
He demonstrated that meteorites were fragments from asteroids and not, as was believed at the time, debris from the moon or comets. He quantified the elements of the solar system in a journal article that has been cited more than 14,000 times. And he uncovered evidence of the global wildfires that helped lead to the dinosaurs' extinction.
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