Alvarez, Walter

WALTER ALVAREZ—University of California—Berkeley, Department of Geology and Geophysics, Berkeley, CA 94720... 

Private communication to Walter Alvarez from K. S. HsU and News Release NSF PR 80-56 (1980). 

Arnold E. Osterberg, Frances R. Vanzant, Walter C. Alvarez, and Andrew B. Rivers, Am. J. Digestive Diseases, 3, 3541 (1936). 

Dr. Walter Alvarez recently told me that when he wrote a paper on food allergies at the Mayo Clinic about fifty years ago, he was severely criticized by his colleagues. Only strong support from one of the Mayos, who discovered that he himself had a food allergy, protected Alvarez from even-more-powerful assault. Medicine seems very reluctant to take unto itself new diseases. 

In 1979 geologist Walter Alvarez and his Nobel Prize-winning physicist father Luis Alvarez suggested that unusually high concentrations of iridium in rocks laid down at the K-T boundary meant that an asteroid had hit the earth, causing tremendous devastation. In the last 20 years much evidence has accumulated to support this hypothesis, including identification of the location of the probable crater caused by the impact in the ocean near Mexico. 

Alvarez, Luis Walter (1911-88) US physicist most of whose working life was spent at the University of California, Berkeley. After working on radar and the atomic bomb during World War 11, he concentrated on particle physics. In 1959 he built the first large bubble chamber and developed the technique for using it to study charged particles, for which he was awarded the 1968 Nobel Prize for physics. 

Illman, Walter, and Pedro Alvarez. Performance Assessment of Bioremediation and Natural Attenuation. Critical Reviews in Environmental Science and Technology 39, no. 4 (April, 2009) 209-270. Reviews state-of-art performance assessment methods and discusses future research directions in bioremediation, natural attenuation, chemical fingerprinting, and molecular biological tools. 

Navajo Times, February 12, 1981 Febmary 19, 1981. Navajo Times, August 27, 1981. For the Church Rock spill, see Harvey Wasserman and Norman Solomon, with Robert Alvarez and Eleanor Walters, Killing Our Own The Disaster of America s Experience with Atomic Radiation (New York Dell, 1982), chap. 9. 

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