| RefNo | EC/2008/41 |
| Level | Item |
| Title | Summons, Roger Everett: certificate of election to the Royal Society |
| Date | 15 May 2008 |
| Description | Certificate of Candidate for Election to the Fellowship |
| Citation | Summons is the leading geochemist studying the molecular record of the earth's early biosphere. He re-opened the whole question of the nature of the microbial life which inhabited Earth's early oceans through his imaginative and painstaking application of molecular techniques to the identification and isotopic characterization of traces of organic matter remaining in ancient sediments. He has shown the extreme antiquity of the biosynthetic pathways that lead to steroids and triterpenoids and demonstrated that key biogeochemical processes such as oxygenic photosynthesis and aerobic respiration were operating more than 2.7 billion years ago. His work on molecular fossils has provided a detailed picture of microbial ecologies which controlled the biogeochemical cycles of the Archaean Eon before there was a robust visible fossil record. He holds the prestigious Treibs Medal of the Geochemical Society for 2003. |
| Extent | 4p |
| AccessStatus | Closed |