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| Min Koide |
Minoru Koide was born
November 2, 1926, in San Diego the fourth child born to Taju and Miwa Koide. His
father, Taju Koide, was the proud captain of the Enterprise, one of the city's
first tuna clippers, if not the first one to carry ice Japanese American
fishing community.
After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Japanese American on the Pacific states were forcibly evacuated from their homes. Min was evacuated with his mother and
siblings to the Santa Anita Assembly Center. They arrived at the Poston,
Arizona concentration camp 3 on August 27, 1942, and assigned to apartment 328-8-D. His father, Taju Koide, was under suspicion as an "enemy alien" as a tuna fisherman, and was arrested and detained for U.S. Immigration. He was transferred
for incarceration to the Department of Justice internment camp at Santa Fe, New
Mexico. On November 28, 1943, his father
was allowed to join the family at Poston, Arizona. Min graduated from Poston 3 High School in 1944 and was a member of the College Bound Club and vice-president of the Lettermen Club. Woodworking was a central passion in Min's later life, which began when the Koide family was at Poston, Arizona camp 3. One of his earliest creations was a chest of drawers with the scrap wood ripped from one of the barbed wire fence posts. On February 5, 1944, he departed from Poston, Arizona to attend college in McPherson,
Kansas.
At age 18 and out of
U.C.L.A., he was given the opportunity to become a chemist at the Scripps Institute
of Oceanography. Over the years, Min participated in many of the early SIO
oceanographic expeditions covering the world oceans. The expeditions collected
sediment cores and sea water samples for analysis in the laboratories. In the
1960s, he developed many analytical methods used in geochronology. These new
methods used isotopes of natural occurring elements the sediments and sea
water. With this method, sediments could be dated and used as chemical tracers.
In the late 1960-1970s, Min in collaboration with Dr. Rudy Bieri, developed a
mass spectrometer capable of measuring trace amounts of inert gasses (helium,
argon neon, krypton) in sea water and sediment. In the early 1970s, Min
developed methods to measure mercury, sulfur and selenium) in sea water and
glacial ice from Greenland. This was the beginning of the study of the
environmental investigation of man's activities on the oceans. This was
followed by studies of the influx heavy elements (lead, mercury, zinc) into the
ocean environment and its effect on the marine sea life's food chain. Again,
isotopes methods were developed to measure the radioactive products resulting
from the nuclear test conducted by the U.S. and Russia. These isotopes
(plutonium) were found both in the northern and southern oceans and in the
north and south polar glaciers.
During his many years
at SIO he acted as a friend, mentor and teacher to many of the graduate
students working on their PhD in Geochemical Oceanography. All his work contributed
to our better understanding of our planet-----the interaction of the
atmosphere, with the oceans-----and the anthropogenic effect.
In 1955, he married Amy
Matsumoto and had one child, Gary, in 1969. For the last 25 years of his life, he was devoted to the passion
of bowl turning from the most exotic hardwoods from every part of the world.
Minoru Koide died on November 23, 2008 to cancer at the age of 82.
Published in The San Diego
Union Tribune on Nov. 30, 2008
