Konrad Emil Bloch

Four of the ten sit in earth signs and only one in water, with three in air and two in fire. Earth builds and air examines, which between them describe laboratory work rather well: the patient accumulation and the taking apart. Bloch was a German American biochemist who won a Nobel Prize for work on cholesterol, and he was born in Poland and died in Massachusetts.

The Sun sits two minutes of arc into Aquarius, which is about as fine a cusp as the arithmetic produces: an hour either side of his birth and it would be Capricorn. Capricorn builds the structure and Aquarius asks why it was built that way. For somebody whose work took a substance everybody already knew about and established how the body actually assembles it, the chart genuinely cannot say which of those instincts was the identity. A researcher who takes an accepted substance and establishes how the body actually makes it is working on exactly that cusp.

The Sun sits conjunct Uranus at three fifths of a degree, identity fused to the planet that refuses the accepted account, which in a research scientist is the whole disposition. A yod holds the Moon, Venus and Neptune and does not resolve. Mars is a twelfth of a degree from a mild contact with Pluto, and Neptune and Pluto were the two retrograde planets at his birth.

He died at Lexington on 15 October 2000, at eighty eight. The Moon that day was full and ninety four per cent lit. That is the phase that sees things clearly and usually through other people, which for a man whose findings were confirmed and extended by everybody after him is a fitting sky. Saturn made easy contact with his natal Sun three hundredths of a degree from the exact angle, and the Sun had returned to his own element of air. The transiting Moon stood square its own birth place at zero orb on the same day, which is as exact as the sky gets.