Photograph: Peter Westbroek and Judith de Jong, waiting for the total solar eclipse in the North of France (1999).

Peter Westbroek (born in 1937) studied geology and did his PhD in fossil brachiopod paleobiology at Leiden University (the Netherlands). He then had a post-doctoral position at Queen’s University in Belfast, where he began biochemical research on biomineralization. In 1970 he could start a small group in the Department of Biochemistry in Leiden, with research on calcification in the coccolithophore Emiliania huxleyi, immunology of fossil macromolecules, and bacterial manganese and iron oxidation. Peter Westbroek gave regular lecture courses on the influence of biological systems on Earth dynamics, and wrote the book “Life as a Geological Force” (1992, Norton). He started the Global Emiliania Modeling Initiative (GEM), an international and interdisciplinary project on the climatic effects of marine phytoplankton, and recently founded with some colleagues the Gaia Science Center. He is Professor of Geophysiology at Leiden University and a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences and Arts, and he occupied the “Chaire Européenne du Collège de France” in 1996–1997.