Alexander, Calvin

With regret, the passing is noted, on April 16, 1997, of Guy G. S. Dutton, a member of the Board of Advisors of Advances for many years and a staunch supporter of the series. Also deceased in 1997 are two giants of science, Melvin Calvin and Alexander Todd, Nobel laureates, each of whom made seminal contributions in the carbohydrate field. 

Meanwhile, work was being carried out to determine the parent of the supposed fission xenon component. In 1971, Calvin Alexander, working at Berkeley, measured the isotopic composition of a sample of plutonium that had been produced by a nuclear reactor. The sample was heated to release all trapped gases and then left on a shelf for 23 months to allow pure plutonium fission xenon to accumulate. The resulting precise composition of plutonium fission xenon eliminated plutonium as the parent of CCFXe. Another hypothesis, championed by Edward Anders of the University of Chicago, was that the CCFXe had been produced by fission of a super-heavy element. Nuclear physicists had presented theoretical... 

Jeffrey A. Dorale, R. Lawrence Edwards, E. Calvin Alexander, Jr., Chuan-Chou Shen, David A. Richards, and Hai Cheng ... 

Jeffrey A. Dorale, Department of Geological Sciences, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO, 65211, USA. R. Lawrence Edwards, E. Calvin Alexander, Jr., Chuan-Chou Shen, and Hai Cheng, Department of Geology and Geophysics, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, 55455, USA. David A. Richards, School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol, Bristol BS8 ISS, UK. 

---