Scientist who posited that information is a fundamental component of the universe. A university professor, biologist, researcher, teacher, and from 1975 until his retirement in 1990, the first head of the Science and Society Department in the University of Bradford, United Kingdom. His family having emigrated from Germany to the United States in the 1930s, he was educated at Drew, Yale, and Rockefeller Universities. He has published several books including The Morphology and Physiology of Plant Tumors (with A. C. Braun, 1958), Nuclear Disaster (1963), The Wealth of Information (1983), The Three Cs: Children, Computers and Communication (with C. Conlin, 1985), The Communicative Society: A New Era in Human History (1985), Information and the Internal Structure of the Universe (1990), Beyond Information: The Natural History of Intelligence, (1992), and Information and Meaning: An Evolutionary Perspective (1997).
His publishing and appointments record illustrate his intellectual development: from a technical biologist, through concern about the horrific consequences of nuclear war; from an appointment to the biology faculty of Manhattan College in 1962, to his joining Adam Curie in 1973 in Peace Studies at Bradford; to his appointment two years later to head Bradford’s newly created Science and Society School.