JEROLD LOWENSTEIN

LOWENSTEIN--Dr. Jerold Dr. Jerold Marvin "Jerry" Lowenstein, physician, researcher and educator whose experiments helped establish the science of molecular paleontology, died on Sept. 23, 2025, at home in Santa Cruz, CA. He was 99. Born in Danville, VA in 1926, Dr. Lowenstein enlisted at 17 and qualified for the Navy's V-12 Officer Training Program during World War II, which enabled young servicemen to combine military service and higher education. In his final active-duty assignment, Ensign Lowenstein served as junior division officer of the Communications Department aboard the USS Albemarle, the ship carrying 70 Los Alamos scientists to Bikini Atoll for atomic testing. There Jerry witnessed the detonation of a nuclear device and its iconic mushroom cloud. He went on to work at Los Alamos from 1946-1948, earning his medical degree at Columbia University in 1953. He made San Francisco, CA his home for most of his career, serving as a Clinical Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. From 1959 to 2000, he led the Department of Nuclear Medicine at California Pacific Medical Center. There he advanced the use of radioimmunoassay (RIA) a technique employing radioactive isotopes to detect trace amounts of bodily chemicals in diagnosing abnormalities such as blood clots, tumors, and thyroid diseases. These tests saved lives well before the development of MRI, CT, and PET scans. Adapting RIA techniques, Dr. Lowenstein pioneered new methods for detecting and identifying proteins in fossilized muscle, bone, skin, and teeth. In 1980, Dr. Lowenstein became the first scientist to isolate species-specific proteins from fossils, detecting albumin in a 40,000-year- old frozen mammoth and confirming its evolutionary ties to modern elephants. He later reported human albumin in a 1.6-million-year-old skull, identified blood residues on prehistoric stone tools, and demonstrated that the fraudulent Piltdown Man jaw was actually that of an orangutan. His work drew national attention, including coverage in The New York Times: "New Test Links Species Over 40,000 Years" (1980), "Researcher Defends Theory on Early Tools" (1987), and "Stains on Prehistoric Tool Are Human Blood" (1987). His research helped resolve evolutionary questions about how extinct species - such as the mammoth, mastodon, Steller's sea cow, quagga, and Tasmanian wolf?are related to species living today. He thus expanded molecular biology into archaeology, paleontology, and human evolution. Dr. Lowenstein authored more than 200 research papers, was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and awarded the Fellows' Medal of the California Academy of Sciences, its highest honor, also contributed columns to Pacific Discovery, California Wild, the Academy's magazines. After retirement he wrote two novels And Now a World and The Dark X: a Medical Mystery. He was a lifelong devotee of Scrabble and The New York Times puzzles, adding the newer word games Wordle and Spelling Bee to his morning routine. He is survived by his wife Adrienne Zihlman, children Penny, Marco and Jill Lowenstein, and grandchildren Hannah, Micah, and Kaileah.