Helen Vaughn Michel

For a real-life Lara Croft to solve an archaeological puzzle, she'd want to call on Helen Vaughn Michel. Michel worked at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory of the University of California, Berkeley, and she was a pioneer in the use of high-tech chemical instruments for studying archaeological artifacts. With her powerful tools, she can, for example, pinpoint the geographic origin of the clay in ancient pottery—a clue to who made it and to the history of ancient trade and communication. She was also on the research team that uncovered what caused the mass extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Michel detected chemical traces of the massive asteroid collision that sealed the dinosaurs' fate.

About Her Life

Helen Vaughn was born in 1932 in Phoenix, Arizona, where her father was a state legislator. When she was in the sixth grade, her parents bought her a chemistry set for one dollar. Her favorite thing about it was the smells she could create with it. A few years later the family moved to Berkeley, California, where she got even more interested in chemistry after seeing one of her teachers, Mr. Larson, give a chemistry demonstration that went awry, ending in an explosion. That bang convinced her that chemistry was the life for her. She was further encouraged by Marjorie Doyle, her high school chemistry teacher, and went on to study chemistry at the University of California at Berkeley.

While in college, she took a part-time job at the UC Berkeley Radiation Laboratory as an assistant in nuclear chemistry and, upon her graduation, accepted a higher-ranking, full-time position at the lab. There she met and married Maynard Michel, also a nuclear chemist. Except for a year of graduate study at Indiana University in 1955–1956, she spent her whole career working at the lab, now known as the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

For many years Michel did typical work in nuclear chemistry, investigating how protons and neutrons are put together inside the nuclei of atoms and what happens inside the nuclei during radioactive decay. In the late 1960s, however, she began using nuclear chemistry to tell the age of archaeological artifacts, an emerging field at the time. She made headlines in 1977 when she was asked to analyze a brass plate found in San Francisco in 1936. The plate had an inscription stating that it had been left by Sir Francis Drake and claiming the California coast for Queen Elizabeth I of England. Historians thought the plate had been left by Drake when he visited the California coast in 1579, but Michel was able to show that the plate was made in the late 1800s or early 1900s, and was therefore a fake.

She was also involved in one of the biggest science news stories of our time, the hypothesis put forth in 1980 that a giant asteroid hit the earth 65 million years ago, explaining the extinction of the dinosaurs. The impact of the asteroid would have sent so much dust and debris from the earth’s surface and the shattered asteroid into the atmosphere that the earth would have been shrouded in darkness for an extended period. Extreme cold and lack of sunlight would have killed off almost all vegetation and led ultimately to starvation among all species, including the dinosaurs. This hypothesis was based on the discovery of a 65-million-year-old layer of rock found in Italy. The layer was rich in the element iridium, rare on earth but common in asteroids. If an asteroid had hit our planet, sending earth and asteroid dust into the air, and the dust eventually settled over the surface of the earth, then 65-million-year-old iridium layers would exist around the world, and all these layers would have the same chemical composition since they came from the same asteroid. Michel was part of the team that helped show that both of these predictions were true, thus supporting the hypothesis.

Now in retirement, Michel and her husband devote their time to their hobby of growing and breeding orchids. The two have turned their hobby into a business, a plant nursery called the Orchids Orinda in their hometown of Livermore, California.

For Further Reading on the Web

Berkeley Scientists Report First Evidence That Dinosaur Extinction Cause by Meteorite Impact, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory National Laboratory site, reprinted from Fall 1979 LBL News Magazine.

Investigating a Mass Extinction Occurring 65 Million Years Ago, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory site, reprinted from Fall 1979 LBL News Magazine.