Friedmann, (E.) Imre

▪ 2008

 Hungarian-born American astrobiologist

born Dec. 20, 1921, Budapest, Hung.

died June 11, 2007

discovered the most compelling evidence of past life on Mars. In 2001 Friedmann led a team of scientists who identified strings of crystals found in fragments of a Martian meteorite as remnants of oxygen-dependent magnetotactic bacteria. Friedmann's expertise in the biology of extreme environments dated back to his discovery, in 1961, of algae in the middle of Israel's Negev desert, which led to similar studies of life in the harsh Gobi and Atacama deserts. In 1976 he (together with his wife, Roseli Ocampo) published the article that first brought his work to NASA's attention; it described cryptoendoliths (bacteria that are “hiders-in-rocks”) from the Ross desert in Antarctica that closely resembled those he would later find in the Martian meteorite. In 1943 Friedmann was among the Jews sent to a forced-labour camp in the Carpathian Mountains (he was liberated the following year). Following the war he earned a Ph.D. (1951) from the University of Vienna. Soon thereafter he moved to Jerusalem, where he served until 1967 as an instructor at the Hebrew University. After a period (1968–2000) as a professor at Florida State University, he became affiliated in 2001 with NASA's Ames Research Center, and from 2005 he was a visiting professor at the University of Washington.

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