May 18 1999
From The Space Library
NASA announced the appointment of Baruch S. Blumberg, winner of the 1976 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, as Director of NASA's Astrobiology Institute, effective immediately. NASA had created the Astrobiology Institute in July 1998, a "virtual organization" comprising NASA's centers, universities, and other scientific entities for the study of "the origin, evolution, distribution, and destiny of life in the universe." The Institute, with a multidisciplinary focus, sought to bring together astronomers, biologists, chemists, exobiologists, geologists, and physicists, to search for the origins of life. NASA Administrator Daniel S. Goldin made the announcement of Blumberg's appointment at Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, the site of the Institute's headquarters. Goldin stated that NASA had tasked the Astrobiology Institute with "providing the `intellectual underpinnings' for building new types of instruments and space probes for finding life in the solar system and beyond.”
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