caption doctoral_advisor thesis_year death_date death_place birth_place thesis_title nationality field work_institutions birth_date thesis_url known_for prizes image article_title name alma_mater
clair cameron patterson harrison brown 1951 05 december 1995 sea ranch , california , u.s. mitchellville , iowa , u.s. the calcium isotopic composition of trace quantities of lead and united states geochemistry california institute of technology june 2 , 1922 http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/4211733 uranium-lead contamination dating , age of the earth , lead tyler -lrb- 1980 -rrb- j. lawrence smith medal -lrb- 1973 -rrb- prize -lrb- 1995 -rrb- v. m. goldschmidt award portrait of clair cameron patterson.jpg clair cameron patterson
 clair cameron patterson grinnell college university of chicago
clair cameron patterson

clair cameron patterson -lrb- june 2 , 1922 -- december 5 , 1995 -rrb- was an american geochemist .
born in mitchellville , iowa , united states he graduated from grinnell college .
he later received his ph.d. from the university of chicago , and spent his entire professional career at the california institute of technology .
in collaboration with george tilton , patterson developed the uranium-lead dating method into lead-lead dating , and by using lead isotopic data from the canyon diablo meteorite , he calculated an age for the earth of 4.55 billion years ; a figure far more accurate than those that existed at the time and one that has remained largely unchanged since 1956 .
patterson had first encountered lead contamination in the late 1940s as a graduate student at the university of chicago .
his work on this led to a total re-evaluation of the growth in industrial lead concentrations in the atmosphere and the human body , and his subsequent campaigning was seminal in the banning of tetraethyllead in gasoline , and lead solder in food cans .
