It is with great sorrow that we announce the passing of Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Marine Chemistry Jeffrey Bada, who advanced the search for the origins of life on Earth and for the existence of life elsewhere in the universe. He passed away on September 1 in La Jolla at the age of 81.
Born on September 10, 1942, Bada was a San Diego native who spent portions of his childhood at his family’s farm near Creston, Iowa. He obtained his PhD in chemistry in 1968 at UC San Diego. He was advised by iconic researcher Stanley Miller, who, with Harold Urey, had conducted famous “primordial soup” laboratory experiments to simulate the conditions on early Earth that could have given rise to life.
Bada continued to pursue the question in his own career. He studied the geochemistry of amino acids, the sources and stability of organic compounds on the primitive Earth and other solar system bodies and the detection of possible remnants of life on solar system bodies.
“Jeff was an outstanding scientist and a leading organic chemist and geochemist,” said former colleague Miriam Kastner, retired professor emerita of geochemistry at Scripps Oceanography. “The use of several amino acid-based techniques for approximate archeological and biological dating was developed in his laboratories.”
“(Bada) is a leading world expert on amino acid geochemistry and cosmochemistry, and has made major contributions to the study of their stability and presence in meteorites, their synthesis under primitive Earth conditions, as well as the development of spaceflight instrument prototypes to search for organics on Mars and other Solar System bodies,” wrote a committee of Bada’s colleagues and former students in nominating him for a 2017 award from the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life. “His studies of the primordial ocean, chemistry, organic compound stability, and abiotic peptide synthesis under possible primitive conditions shaped generations of origin of life research.”
In pursuit of signs that life could have existed on Mars, in the early 2000s he designed a detector to be part of a spaceship’s science payload that would search for amino acids like the kind that give rise to life. NASA ultimately shelved the project, but successor missions now planned have much the same goal. In 1992, he helped form the NASA Specialized Center of Research and Training in Exobiology (NSCORT), initially led by Miller. The center focused on the study of origin and evolution of life in the universe, whether on Earth or elsewhere.
Bada joined Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego in 1969, the year after he received his PhD. He retired in 2010 as a distinguished professor but remained at Scripps as a returning research professor until 2017. He was the author of the books “The Spark of Life: Darwin and the Primeval Soup” (2000), co-authored with UC San Diego biologist Christopher Wills, and “Science at Interfaces, from Biochemistry to Cosmochemistry” (2024). Bada co-authored more than 250 research papers during his career.
Bada is survived by his wife Margaret Schoeninger of La Jolla, herself a distinguished emerita professor of anthropology and co-director of the Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropology at UC San Diego; sons Greg of San Diego and Scott of Reno, Nev., and grandson Elliot of Encinitas, Calif.
