Harold J. Morowitz, biophysicist and witty essayist, dies at 88
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Version 0 of 1. Harold J. Morowitz, a biophysicist known within his field as a leading authority on the origins of life and to the wider community as an author of humorous essays on subjects including the thermodynamics of pizza, overpriced breakfast cereal and the use of the guillotine, died March 22 at a hospital in Fairfax County, Va. He was 88. The cause was complications from sepsis, said a son, Noah Morowitz. Since 1988, Dr. Morowitz had been a Clarence Robinson Professor of biology and natural philosophy at George Mason University in Fairfax County. He had earlier spent 32 years at Yale University, where he became a professor of molecular biophysics and biochemistry. Dr. Morowitz’s research led him to propose ideas about evolution and the origins of life on Earth. In a departure from many other theories in this area, he suggested that life was generated through the working of fundamental physical and chemical laws on the environment that existed immediately prior to the emergence of the first living organisms. And he was prominent among those involved with efforts to link the scientific concept of entropy to the origin of life. Entropy is a unifying concept that provides insight into the behavior of physical systems on the basis of the flow of energy to them and from them, and how their overall orderliness or disorderliness increases or decreases. His books included “Energy Flow in Biology” (1968). In the early 1980s, Dr. Morowitz testified in the Arkansas court case McLean v. Arkansas — sometimes called “Scopes II” — in which parents, scientists, religious groups and others successfully challenged a state law calling for the teaching of “creation science” in schools alongside evolutionary biology. Dr. Morowitz gave expert testimony that there is no scientific basis for the creationist belief in the origin of life and therefore it should not be taught as science in the public school curriculum. At George Mason, he was one of the first faculty members to join the Robinson Professor program, which brings to the university’s Northern Virginia campus distinguished senior faculty members at other institutions to focus on undergraduate teaching. This semester, he was teaching an honors course, “Reading the Arts: Biological Themes in Literature.” He had written essays on this theme, one of which he began by confessing, “For years I have been practicing English without a license.” He helped establish at George Mason the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study, named for the late Northern Virginia businessman Shelley Krasnow, who gave $20 million to GMU. A body of scholars, including four Nobel Prize-winners, determined that the institute would function as a think tank to study the brain. Dr. Morowitz was its director from its opening in 1993 until 1998. Harold Joseph Morowitz was born in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., on Dec. 4, 1927. His father was a newspaper and magazine distributor. He graduated in 1947 from Yale, where he also received a master’s degree in physics in 1950 and a doctorate in biophysics in 1951. He was on the Yale faculty from 1955 to 1987, including five years as master of Pierson College, one of the residential colleges at Yale. Survivors include his wife of 67 years, Lucille Stein Morowitz, of Woodbridge, Conn.; four sons, Eli Morowitz of Foster City, Calif., Joshua Morowitz of Greenville, S.C., Zachary Morowitz of New Haven, Conn., and Noah Morowitz of Kensington, Md.; and nine grandchildren. A daughter, Joanna Morowitz, died in 2010. Dr. Morowitz, who lived in Fairfax County, was author or co-author of 19 books and was a consultant to NASA on space missions. As an essayist, he liked to explore the application of scientific principles to such happenings as the retention of heat in a freshly baked pizza, the physics of washing a load of laundry, homeopathy, admissions to American medical schools, the evolution of snakes, the baking of bagels, the mixing of a martini, and a cross-cultural analysis of bathing habits. In an essay titled “The Kindly Dr. Guillotin,” he wrote of Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, a physician and deputy in the National Assembly of France in the early stage of the French Revolution who recognized and promoted the swift and efficient decapitation contraption that came to bear his name. Guillotin, according to Dr. Morowitz, thought this method of execution was in keeping with the equality principle of the revolution by subjecting all capital offenders, nobility and commoners, to the same method of death. Previously commoners had died by the noose and aristocrats by the axe. Read more Washington Post obituaries |