Horowitz, Norman H. (Norman Harold), 1915-2005

Biography

Norman Harold Horowitz was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1915, the eldest of three boys, and the son of an émigré businessman and Bostonian mother. Raised in the middle-class neighborhood of Squirrel Hill, he attended public elementary and secondary schools, where at the latter he was made valedictorian.

In 1932, Horowitz entered the University of Pittsburgh after securing a scholarship. There he majored in zoology, carrying out independent research as an undergraduate. From Pittsburgh, he moved to Pasadena and the California Institute of Technology in the autumn of 1936, where he worked with T.H. Morgan and Albert Tyler. Attending Caltech gave Horowitz the opportunity to spend weekends at the Institute's laboratory in Corona Del Mar and summers accompanying Morgan and Tyler to Woods Hole. It was at Woods Hole that Horowitz met his future wife, Pearl, in 1937.

After receiving his Ph.D. in 1939, Horowitz accepted a fellowship to Douglas Whitaker's Stanford University laboratory. At Stanford he continued his research on the metabolism of embryos and became acquainted with George Beadle, who was working with Drosophila . He returned to Caltech to work in the laboratory of Henry Borsook, but after learning of Beadle's experiments with Neurospora, Horowitz joined Beadle's group in Stanford, working in Northern California until the group dissolved in 1946.

Dr. Horowitz returned to Caltech with Beadle, where he joined the faculty and where he became a key player in the formation of biochemical genetics. In particular, Horowitz - with colleagues such as Howard Teas and Marguerite Fling - used mutants to demonstrate the soundness of the "one-gene, one-enzyme" theory and the ways in which mutants could be exploited for practical applications. His work on the evolution of biochemical synthesis remains an important contribution to the theory of organic evolution and the origin of life.

Horowitz's attachment to the space program began shortly after the flight of Sputnik I in 1957. Soon thereafter, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) announced that a major goal of their program would be the biological exploration of planets, and Horowitz took the opportunity to become involved in "exobiology," or the search for extra-terrestrial life. Working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena - and becoming chief of its bioscience section in 1965 - he helped design a number of instruments for the Mars Mariner and Viking missions, including "Gulliver" and the "pyrolytic release" experiments. His extensive work in this area eventually led him to the conclusion that Martian soil is "lifeless": indeed, by the time that he published his popular book, To Utopia and Back, (1986), Horowitz was "virtually certain that the earth is the only life-bearing planet in our region of the galaxy."

Following his prominent work on the Mars Mariner and Viking programs, Horowitz returned to his laboratory at the California Institute of Technology. In the early 1980s, he published notable work on Siderophores, a type of chelating agent in fungi that helps the fungi to absorb iron. During the 1980s Horowitz became increasingly involved in several controversies, including the debates about evolution and creationism in schools.

Currently, Dr. Horowitz is Professor Emeritus at Caltech, as well as a member of the

National Academy of Sciences. He lives in Pasadena.

From the guide to the Norman H. Horowitz papers, 1940-1992, (California Institute of Technology. Archives.)