Edward Anders passed away peacefully in California on June 1, 2025. He was 98.
He was born in Liepāja, Latvia on June 21, 1926 as the second son of Adolf and Erica Alperovitch. In 1940, the Soviet Union invaded and occupied Latvia along with the other two Baltic countries. In June 1941, Germany started a surprise attack against the Soviet Union. Anders and his mother survived the Holocaust that ravaged in Latvia by claiming she was Aryan. When the Soviet Union was advancing in Latvia toward Liepāja toward the end of the war, Germans offered temporary asylum in Germany to “trustworthy refugees”. Realizing that this would be the only opportunity to be liberated by the Western Allies and be able to avoid the Soviet regime, Anders and his mother left for Germany in late 1944. After Germany surrendered, they reached Munich. Anders enrolled in the UNRRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration) University and the University of Munich. In 1949, he and his mother emigrated to the United States and later changed their surname to Anders.
Anders’ fascination for meteorites started when Brian Mason, a curator of the American Museum of Natural History and professor at Columbia University, showed meteorites in his geochemistry course at Columbia University, where Anders was a graduate student in 1953. After he received his PhD in radiochemistry from Columbia University in 1954, he was offered a position at The University of Chicago in 1955. At that time, Chicago was the center of cosmochemistry research in the world. He was appointed Horace B. Horton professor of Chemistry in 1973. He remained at The University of Chicago until he retired in 1991.
Anders and his group measured trace elements in lunar samples brought back by Project Apollo using neutron activation analysis (NAA) with laborious radiochemical separations. He decided to terminate the neutron-activation part of his work in 1981 to concentrate on projects using noble gas mass spectrometry. Roy Lewis joined the group in 1972 and worked with Anders until his retirement. Lewis was a capable physicist who had studied under world leader John Reynolds at the University of California, Berkeley.
It was known that there exist isotopically anomalous noble gas components in meteorites from the analyses in 1969-1978. From those analyses, it was clear that a small amount of grains produced in stars are contained in primitive meteorites. The carriers are what we now call presolar grains. Anders persisted in isolating and identifying carriers of the anomalous noble gases. He had acquired a very strong background in analytical chemistry at Munich and it had been further developed in the 1950s. That knowledge helped Anders design chemical separation procedures. Lewis’ insight was also integrated into the procedures, which have been described as a way “to burn the haystack to find the needle”, destroying almost all other phases to extract presolar grains. The isotopically anomalous noble gases served as tags to those grains during the quest for presolar grains. Presolar nanodiamonds, silicon carbide (SiC) and graphite were all isolated and identified in Anders’ lab between 1987 and 1990. Those discoveries have opened up a new field of astronomy: The study of stardust in the laboratory. A wealth of information on nucleosynthesis and mixing in stars has been obtained from the study of presolar grains.
Anders, with Nicolas Grevesse, published a paper on the solar abundance in 1989. The solar abundance is a fundamental scale to which all other abundances are compared to. It is essential to astrophysical model calculations of stars. Although some of the numbers have recently been updated due to the advancement in observation and theory, the paper has remained one of the most cited papers in cosmochemistry: It has 14,000 citations in Google Scholar as of June 2025.
Anders also had a passion for things other than science. He and his wife, Joan, enjoyed classical music, opera, gentle hikes, and Ancient Egypt.
After his retirement in 1991, Anders and his wife divided their time between Europe and the United States for a few years. They eventually settled in California.
One of the projects Anders took on after his retirement was to retrieve the names of the Jews who perished during the Nazi occupation of his hometown, Liepāja. He and Juris Dubrovskis, a collaborator of this project, used 13 different sources, mainly the census in 1941, and recovered the names and the fates of ~7000 of the ~7140 Jews living in the town.
He was elected as a member of The National Academy of Sciences in 1974. His many honors and awards include The J. Lawrence Smith Medal in 1971, The Leonard Medal in 1974, The V. M. Goldschmidt Award in 1990, The Gerard P. Kuiper Prize in 1991, and The Harry H. Hess Medal in 1995. He was the president of The Meteoritical Society in 1991-1992.
He is survived by his two children George (Betsy) and Nanci, five grandchildren (Sara, Amy, Emily, Leah, and Peter) and three great-grandchildren (Avery, Ezra, and Calvin).
Submitted by Sachiko Amari