William R. Walton
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April 11, 1923
William R. Walton | |
|---|---|
| Born | William Ralph Walton April 11, 1923 Fort Worth, United States |
| Died | April 23, 2001 (aged 78) Valparaiso, Indiana, United States |
| Pen name | Bill Walton |
| Occupation | Oceanographer |
| Period | 1950–1990 |
| Subject | Micropaleontology, foraminifera |
| Spouse | Ann Walton |
| Children | 2 |
Dr. William Ralph "Bill" Walton (1923–2001) was a leading researcher in the study of modern foraminifera.
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Bill Walton was born April 11, 1923, in Fort Worth, Texas. Walton was a pilot in the Army Air Corps during World War II. He died on April 23, 2001, in Valparaiso, Indiana.
Education
After the war he returned to finish his undergraduate degree at Amherst College; he graduated with an Honors A.B. in geology in 1949. There he worked closely with Fred B. Phleger, a premier academic foraminiferologist (who transplanted his research group to SIO in 1949); this close friendship and joint interest in living foraminifera lasted throughout the lives of both men. Bill's Scripps/UCLA doctoral thesis (1954) under Phleger, was titled "The Ecology of Living Foraminifera, Todos Santos Bay, Baja California." His field work employed the RV E.W. Scripps, crewed in part by fellow graduate students.
Rose Bengal Dye
In 1952, while a graduate student, Walton published the paper "Techniques for recognition of living foraminifera".[1] This would become his most-cited paper. It describes a technique for using a protoplasm stain, Rose bengal, to discriminate between living and dead foraminifera in modern samples. Generations of scientists have used this stain on samples taken from oceans around the world and successfully determined how deep in the sediment living foraminifera were burrowing. The technique has proven controversial with some scientists claiming it tends to "overstain". Walton considered these claims to be baseless and stated that "people are not following the published technique".