January 28, 2011

To behold the Grand Canyon without thoughts of its ancient condors, sloths, and goats is to be half blind—Paul S. Martin 1992

Paul S. Martin, a monumental figure in paleontology and ecology, died on September 13, 2010, at the age of 82. He wanted others to know, conveyed in a message from his wife, that when the time came, he would “die” and then be “dead.” He would not pass on, go gently, meet his maker, or go over to the other side. Paul combined an intense love for life, adventure, and natural history with innovative thinking, to an extent that is increasingly rare in today’s age of specialization. His impact on science was deep and transformative, cutting across many disciplines including ecology, paleontology, anthropology, and biodiversity conservation.

Paul is best known for his work on the loss of America’s charismatic megafauna, from mastodons and mammoths to saber-toothed cats and sloths. He first published on the subject in 1958, and later authored seminal works on the subject [1]–[5]. Early in his career, Paul framed what has become one of the most enduring scientific whodunits of all time: what drove Late Pleistocene extinction—and what role did humans play? In 1966, writing about his “overkill hypothesis,” in which he indicted early humans for Pleistocene extinctions, Paul commented that it “is likely to continue to provoke serious and perhaps unanswerable objections” [5]. That turned out to be an understatement: the role of humans in Pleistocene extinction has been debated, often heatedly and almost continuously, for the last 50 years. While Paul relentlessly promoted the idea humans played the significant role in the demise of the Pleistocene megafauna, he embraced even his most critical dissenters—indeed, he invited criticism. His colleague Karl Flessa commented, “Paul really wanted to see things the way his opponents saw them, in order to understand even more about his favorite topic, Pleistocene extinctions." Paul’s 50-year journey with Pleistocene extinction is documented in his memoir Twilight of the Mammoths [6].

But Paul’s impact on science goes far beyond Pleistocene extinction. Paul Martin was a true Renaissance man—leveraging natural history to innovate new perspectives time and time again. In his monograph The Last 10,000 Years: A Fossil Pollen Record of the American Southwest, Paul took palynology (the study of pollen grains and other spores) to a far from obvious place: the dry lakes of Arizona. Edward Deevey, Paul’s post-doctoral supervisor, declared, “His pioneering work is exciting, not only for what it tells, but even more for what it promises: history, free of peat-bound preconceptions, in a land of little mud” [7].

Left wanting to unravel more tales of the ecological past, Paul then turned to packrat middens, helping to develop a new subdiscipline of paleontology that is among the most important tools of historical ecology [8]. His classic publication, Neotropical Anachronisms with Dan Janzen, changed the way ecologists view species interactions by elucidating the role of extinct vertebrates on contemporary ecology and life history traits [9]. Paul had a life-long love affair with Mexico and the country’s diverse flora and fauna. He spearheaded the Rio Mayo Project, updating Howard Scott Gentry’s Rio Mayo Plants: A Study of the Flora and Vegetation of the Valley of the Rio Mayo, Sonora [10], a project that involved 20+ years of field trips and the collection of over 15,000 specimens. From remote mangroves to ridge top conifer forests in the Sierra Madre Occidental, Paul traveled across one of Mexico’s most precious and inaccessible biomes—by bush plane, vehicle, burro, kayak, and foot. This was a remarkable feat for any biologist, even more extraordinary for a man that suffered from polio early in life and later relied on crutches.

Born in Allentown, Pennsylvania, Paul earned his bachelor’s degree in zoology from Cornell University. From his teens through his eighth decade, Paul was all about fieldwork. By the time he graduated from Cornell in 1951, he had published papers on the natural history of bicolored hawks and black robins in western Mexico. Paul told us of grand times shooting birds for museum specimens with a shotgun out of the top floor of Cornell’s Fernow Hall, and of long road trips to the cloud forests of Tamaulipas, Mexico that involved an old jeep, binoculars, bad roads, and lots of flat tires. In those days, the 2000+-mile trip to Tamaulipas was likely worth a degree in itself. He went on to earn a Master’s and doctorate from the University of Michigan, studying the biogeography of amphibians and reptiles in those forests, an exercise in historical ecology that heavily influenced his life. Paul spent four years at Yale University and the University of Montreal as a post-doctoral researcher before moving to the Geochronology Laboratory at the University of Arizona in 1957. He would enjoy the rest of his career in Tucson, much of it as a professor of geosciences at the University’s Desert Laboratory, perched on Tumamoc Hill.

Aside from his contributions to paleontology and ecology, Paul also influenced how we think about biodiversity conservation. For decades, almost single-handedly, he pondered the impact of megafaunal loss during the end of the Pleistocene on contemporary ecosystems: “Perhaps the long-lauded home where buffalo roam,” he wrote in 1969, “is also the land where camel and eland should play” [11]. His insights on the role of ecological history in biodiversity conservation culminated with the recent proposal of Pleistocene Rewilding, a call for science-based restoration of missing ecological functions and evolutionary potential of lost megafauna using extant conspecifics and related taxa [12],[13]. Paul was keenly aware that nativeness, place, and history are central to the science, strategies, and aesthetics of biodiversity conservation. His work was central in elucidating the all-to-common post-Columbian bias that blinds a paleoecological view of biodiversity and ecosystems.

Another influential ecologist, Larry Slobodkin, died a year and a day before Paul Martin. Late in life Slobodkin was asked, “What do ecologists do?” He replied that it consists of choosing one of three paths and doing it well: the first was to become an expert on some group of organisms that excites you; the second was to master the most cutting-edge techniques; and the third, the most perilous path, was to “strenuously avoid doing what everyone else is doing and search for new ideas and new tests for old ideas” [14]. Paul Martin remarkably did all three brilliantly. The mystery of the Pleistocene extinction fascinated the naturalists of the 18th and 19th century, including Darwin, Wallace, Lyell, Owen, and Cuvier. Paul contributed more to solving this grand enigma than anyone living or dead. He was a pioneer in interdisciplinary research long before it was popular on academic campuses, and he sought new perspectives in natural history, often seizing on novel technologies to solve problems. But, Paul was more than that: he loved life and loved people. While our interactions with Paul were largely restricted to his later years, his influence on us—like many—was transformative. He even loved chiggers, harbingers of summer rain. One morning over coffee in the Arizona hill country, Paul declared with a big grin, “May the gods smile, the chiggers are rampant in the green hills of Sonoita these days.”

References Top

1. Martin P. S (1958) Pleistocene ecology and biogeography of North America. In: Hubbs C. L, editor. Zoogeography. Washington (D.C.): American Association for the Advancement of Science. pp. 375–420.
2. Martin P. S (1973) The discovery of America. Science 179: 969–974. Find this article online
3. Martin P. S, Klein R. G (1984) Quaternary extinctions : a prehistoric revolution. x. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.. 892p p.
4. Martin P. S, Wright H. E, editors. (1967) Pleistocene extinctions: the search for a cause. New Haven: Yale University Press. 440p p.
5. Martin P. S (1966) Africa and Pleistocene overkill. Nature 212: 339–342. Find this article online
6. Martin P. S (2005) Twilight of the mammoths: ice age extinctions and rewilding America. Berkeley: University of California. 274p p.
7. Martin P. S (1963) The last 10,000 years: a fossil pollen record of the American Southwest. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. 87p p.
8. Betancourt J. L, Van Devender T. R, Martin P. S (1990) Packrat middens : the last 40,000 years of biotic change.Tucson: University of Arizona Press. vii467p. Find this article online
9. Janzen D. H, Martin P. S (1982) Neotropical anachronisms: the fruits the gomphotheres ate. Science 215: 19–27. Find this article online
10. Martin P. S, Yetman D. A, Fishbein M. E, Jenkins P. D, Devender T. R. V (1998) Gentry's Rio Mayo plants: the tropical deciduous forest and environs of northwest Mexico. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
11. Martin P. S (1969) Wanted: a suitable herbivore. Natural History 78: 35–39. Find this article online
12. Donlan C. J, Berger J, Bock C. E, Bock J. H, Burney D. A, et al. (2006) Pleistocene Rewilding: an optimistic agenda for 21st century conservation. American Naturalist 168: 660–681. Find this article online
13. Donlan C. J, Greene H. W, Berger J, Bock C. E, Bock J. H, et al. (2005) Re-wilding North America. Nature 436: 913–914. Find this article online
14. Futuyma D. J, Colwell R. K (2010) Lawrence B. Slobodkin (1928-2009): integrating theory, models, and experiments in ecology. PLoS Biol 12: e1000261. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1000261.

Daniel Bell (1919-2011)

Ray Stubblebine, AP Images

Daniel Bell had ideas as big as their influence.

Enlarge Image

Ray Stubblebine, AP Images

Daniel Bell had ideas as big as their influence.

By Kevin Mattson

In the spring of 1979, shocked by polling that showed Americans deeply distrustful of their government, Jimmy Carter summoned prominent intellectuals for a dinner. Over lamb chops and asparagus, Daniel Bell, with other guests, discussed with the president the renewal of religious faith, the difference between "needs" and "wants," the loss of "civitas," and the language of public compact. The president, who speed-read Bell's The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (Basic Books, 1976) , included the sociologist's ideas—about "wants" perpetuated by consumer culture and the covenant tradition—in his famous "malaise" speech of July 15, 1979.

Such was Daniel Bell. He had ideas as big as their influence. He belonged to an older generation of nonspecialized writers, the "New York intellectuals," or, when we're in a more nostalgic and self-lacerating mode, "public intellectuals." A professional sociologist, yes, but who never completed a Ph.D. program and who read literature and philosophy more than statistical studies ("I specialize in generalizations," he told an early instructor).

I just reread "Technology, Nature, and Society" in The Winding Passage (Abt Books, 1980) and found references to Marx, Hegel, ancient Greek philosophers, Prometheus, Aeschylus, Galileo, Descartes, Arthur Koestler, and Thomas Aquinas, all in about seven pages. Bell was like Max Weber or Thorstein Veblen (both sociologists he admired), posing big questions about character, politics, and economic organization. He was on a par with Talcott Parsons (except that Bell could write clearly) and C. Wright Mills (whom Bell despised, in part because he deemed Mills's sociology of power vulgar and reductionist). Like David Riesman, whom he admired, Bell wrote sociology for general readers but never descended into the superficial pop sociology of William H. Whyte, Tom Wolfe, or David Brooks.

Bell began his career, which eventually included teaching at major Ivy League institutions (Chicago, Columbia, and Harvard), as a kid socialist on the streets of the Lower East Side of Manhattan. In 1932, when 13, he joined the Young People's Socialist League. He learned to argue on city soap boxes and then in the noisy lunch alcoves of City College of New York, where Trotskyists screamed at Stalinists during the 1930s and 1940s.

If his first vocation was socialist agitator, his second was journalist. He spent the war years at The New Leader (during which time he married Pearl Kazin, sister of the literary critic, Alfred) and wrote for the flitty Politics editor Dwight Macdonald. He dissected, as Macdonald's biographer put it, "a liberal, monopolistic, corporate state that absorbed labor into its orbit and ran an economy to serve the interests of ... international firms." He started a book from these essays. Then, as he explained later, "having written about 150 pages ... I thought, What do I know about this? Who am I kidding? This is silly. ... I abandoned it." The act reflected Bell's intellectual humility and his desire to transcend clichéd radicalism.

About 15 years later, Bell would write a book that showed how he could, during the next two decades, define and swim with major intellectual currents. He was not the first to use the phrase "end of ideology," but he codified it in a book in 1960. He heard the phrase in meetings of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the international group of writers and artists whom he worked with who were combating Soviet Communism in Western Europe. The End of Ideology assembled punchy essays, "written for audiences not specialized but educated." That was Bell's forte, as it was many New York intellectuals'. The End of Ideology ranged from the "discontent" of working in bureaucratic organizations, crime in America, and "status" politics.

But the book will mostly be remembered for its rejection of chiliastic, utopian politics on the left. Bell joined autobiography with observation: "The ideologist ... wants to live at some extreme, and criticizes the ordinary man for failing to live at the level of grandeur." Here was a foreshadowing of student radicals about to hit the scene (Tom Hayden, in fact, visited Bell for advice around this time). "What gives ideology its force," Bell went on, "is its passion," as well its danger. He hoped as Americans entered the placid 1950s that they might develop a politics of "pragmatic give-and-take." Like other writers who announced a "consensus" during the 1950s, Bell fudged whether his was a normative or empirical argument. He talked of "a rough consensus among intellectuals on political issues: the acceptance of the Welfare State; ... a system of mixed economy and of political pluralism." Rereading those words today, I remembered another of Bell's favorite judgments: "Nonsense." He was more accurate in a book of essays that he edited, The Radical Right (Doubleday, 1963), where he talked about the populist passions swirling through Joseph McCarthy's followers and foresaw, knowingly or not, the passions of student New Leftists who would take over his own institution, Columbia University, in 1968.

From 1965 to 1973, Bell co-edited The Public Interest with Irving Kristol, an association that some believed symbolized a drift toward neoconservatism. But Bell really drifted toward his own thinking about a "postindustrial society," a concept that animated sociological thinking throughout the 1960s and 1970s. "In capitalist society, the axial institution has been private property and in the postindustrial society it is the centrality of theoretical knowledge," Bell wrote. He explored ways education and professional training worked as a new "axis" of power (a term he loved) and how technocrats and wonks gained power. Like Veblen before him, Bell rejected Marxism for ignoring the pluralities of power operating in modern (and postmodern) society.

The culmination of Bell's life work came in 1976 with The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (Basic Books). Here was a book that nailed the ethos of the 1970s while offering insights about the nature of postmodern capitalism. Bell analyzed the "disjuncture of the realms," especially between consumption and work. The Protestant work ethic Weber analyzed years ago still operated, except in leisure where hedonism dominated.

Consider the popular movie Saturday Night Fever, released one year after Bell's book: John Travolta's character works at a hardware store by day but lives for disco at night. Capitalism had destroyed the postponement of gratification. Bell explained, "The rise of a hip-drug-rock culture on the popular level ... undermines the social structure itself by striking at the motivational and the psychic-reward system which has sustained it." Unlike other neoconservatives who had nothing but good to say about capitalism, Bell believed capitalism was kicking out the legs under its own table. He took his cultural conservatism seriously but joined it to his liberalism in politics and socialism in economics.

That too was Daniel Bell: a man who thought big and embraced complexity and nuance at his core. He followed ideas where they led him. He was as large as the contradictions and multitudes he held within his own mind. And for that and much more, he will be missed.

Kevin Mattson teaches American intellectual history at Ohio University and is the author of "What the Heck Are You Up to, Mr. President?": Jimmy Carter, America's "Malaise," and the Speech That Should Have Changed the Country (Bloomsbury, 2009).

January 29, 2011

Eleanor Galenson, Expert on Children’s Sexual Identity, Dies at 94

By DENNIS HEVESI

Dr. Eleanor Galenson, a psychoanalyst whose research demonstrated that children are aware of sexual identity in infancy, even earlier than Freud had propounded, died on Jan. 15 at her home in Manhattan. She was 94.

Her son Paul Himmelstein confirmed the death.

Dr. Galenson, who in her 65-year career was a professor of psychiatry at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx and Mount Sinai Medical Center in Manhattan, spent thousands of hours observing and documenting the actions and reactions of infants.

In 1981, with Dr. Herman Roiphe, she published “Infantile Origins of Sexual Identity.” Considered a significant book in the field, it refined existing Freudian theory about when children begin their sexual development. Dr. Roiphe died in 2005.

Freud postulated that awareness of genital difference does not affect children until the Oedipal stage — around 4 to 5 years old — when boys become competitive with their fathers for their mothers’ attention and girls turn more toward their fathers.

But Freud’s writing on psychosexual development was based on work with adult patients, said Dr. Nellie Thompson, a historian of psychoanalysis.

“What Galenson and Roiphe were doing was observing very young children in the nursery over time,” Dr. Thompson said. “They concluded that children make the discovery of genital difference between the ages of 15 to 19 months, and that this has an impact on their play, their relationship with their own bodies, their relationship with their parents.”

Dr. Galenson and Dr. Roiphe wrote in the book that as their research proceeded “we became increasingly convinced that we had been engaged in tracing the development of the sense of sexual identity from its vague beginnings during the earliest weeks and months to a definite conscious awareness of specific gender and genital erotic feelings and fantasies by the end of the second year.

“This definitive awareness,” they continued, “has turned out to be a critical factor in ongoing psychological development and has therefore been designated as the beginning of a new psychosexual phase.”

Later research by Dr. Galenson documented that subtle differences exhibited by children during the new psychosexual phase could indicate lasting effects. Her observations, said Dr. Patricia Nachman, a clinical psychologist at Mount Sinai Medical Center, “led to the idea that some of these children with very early sexual awareness may be more anxious children.”

Dr. Galenson was an advocate of early counseling for those children and their families — including play therapy, with the parents participating — for almost half a century “during a time when there were very few champions of this view,” Dr. Nachman said.

Eleanor Galenson was born in the Bronx on Oct. 28, 1916, one of two children of Louis and Libby Galenson. She graduated from Barnard in 1936 and was one of the first women to attend the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, from which she received a medical degree in 1940. She went on to train as a psychoanalyst at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, graduating in 1950.

Research was only a part of Dr. Galenson’s work. For many years she directed therapeutic nurseries at Mount Sinai and the Albert Einstein Medical Center. She also helped create clinics for troubled children in East Harlem and the Bronx. She was a founder of the World Association for Infant Psychiatry, now called the World Association for Infant Mental Health.

Dr. Galenson’s husband, Leonard Weinroth, died in 1988. Her first husband, Aaron Himmelstein, died in 1959. Besides her son Paul, she is survived by another son, David Himmelstein, and two grandchildren.

January 21, 2011

Stem cell pioneer McCulloch dies

By CBC News
CBC News

Ernest McCulloch, who was part of the team that first proved the existence of stem cells, has died. He was 84.

Ernest McCulloch, who was part of the team that first proved the existence of stem cells, has died. He was 84.

The stem cell pioneer and his partner James Till are credited with revolutionizing the field of stem cell biology and the treatment of chronic disease.

"I was deeply saddened to hear of the passing of Dr. Ernest McCulloch, a founding father of stem cell research and a true Canadian scientific giant," Glen Murray, Ontario's minister of research and innovation, said in a statement Friday.

"All of the stem cell research happening today can be traced to their groundbreaking work in the 1960s, work that paved the way for bone marrow transplants for cancer patients."

McCulloch's death came days before a celebration to mark the 50th anniversary of the discovery.

"In addition to providing detailed information about blood cell development, they [McCulloch and Till] established the concept of stem cells and set the framework in which stem cells are studied today," said the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame's website. The group inducted McCulloch in 2004.

"Their work gains a new freshness with the current interest in harnessing the developmental program of stem cells for therapeutic purposes."

McCulloch was born in Toronto and was a lead researcher at the Ontario Cancer Institute and the Institute of Medical Science at the University of Toronto.

No cause of death was given.

Press Release 11-021 Home and Away: Are Invasive Plant Species Really That Special? Invasive plants are a major environmental problem--but how abundant are they? Research in Sevilleta, N.M., shows that plant abundance at home predicts abundance away. Credit and Larger Version February 1, 2011 Invasive plant species are a serious environmental, economic and social problem worldwide. Their abundance can lead to lost native biodiversity and ecosystem functions, such as nutrient cycling. Despite substantial research, however, little is known about why some species dominate new habitats over native plants that technically should have the advantage. A common but rarely tested assumption, say biologists, is that these plants behave in a special way, making them more abundant when introduced into communities versus native plants that are already there. If true, it would mean that biosecurity screening procedures need to address how species will behave once introduced to nonnative communities--very difficult to get right, researchers have found. Scientists in a global collaboration called the Nutrient Network tested this "abundance assumption" for 26 plant species at 39 locations on four continents and found numerous problems with it. The results are published in a paper in the current issue of the journal Ecology Letters. "Predicting success of invading species is difficult and uncertain, but very important," says Henry Gholz, program director in the National Science Foundation (NSF)'s Division of Environmental Biology, which funds the Nutrient Network. "The Nutrient Network has enabled a field test of one of the most basic assumptions of current models," says Gholz, "and found it lacking. But, the results could lead to better predictions in the future." Twenty of the 26 species examined had a similar or lower abundance at introduced versus native sites. "The results suggest that invasive plants have a similar or lower abundance at both introduced and native ranges, and that increases in species abundance are unusual," says scientist Jennifer Firn from Queensland University of Technology and CSIRO, Australia, the lead author of the paper's 36 co-authors. "Instead, abundance at native sites can predict abundance at introduced sites, a criterion not currently included in biosecurity screening programs." Sites in New Zealand and Switzerland, for example, were similar in species composition, sharing--in some cases--more than 10 species, all with similar abundances. The results are the first to be published from the Nutrient Network. The Nutrient Network is led by individual researchers at the various sites, and coordinated through NSF funding to biologists Elizabeth Borer and Eric Seabloom of the University of Minnesota. "The Nutrient Network is the only collaboration of its kind where individual researchers have set up the same experiment at sites around the world," says Borer. For three years scientists have been collecting population, community and ecosystem-scale plant data, including species-specific distribution and abundance data, with standardized protocols across dozens of sites. "The experimental design used is simple," says Borer, "but it's one that provides a new, global-scale approach for addressing many critical ecological issues. "It will tell us information we need to know about invasive species and changing climates." -NSF- Media Contacts Cheryl Dybas, NSF (703) 292-7734 cdybas@nsf.gov Related Websites NSF Nutrient Network: http://nutnet.umn.edu The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent federal agency that supports fundamental research and education across all fields of science and engineering. In fiscal year (FY) 2010, its budget is about $6.9 billion. NSF funds reach all 50 states through grants to nearly 2,000 universities and institutions. Each year, NSF receives over 45,000 competitive requests for funding, and makes over 11,500 new funding awards. NSF also awards over $400 million in professional and service contracts yearly. Get News Updates by Email  Useful NSF Web Sites: NSF Home Page: http://www.nsf.gov NSF News: http://www.nsf.gov/news/ For the News Media: http://www.nsf.gov/news/newsroom.jsp Science and Engineering Statistics: http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/ Awards Searches: http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/  Marshall Stoneham: 1940–2011 Feb 18, 2011 5 comments Marshall Stoneham The theoretical condensed-matter physicist Marshall Stoneham died earlier today at the age of 70. Stoneham, who was a fellow of the Royal Society, spent much of his career studying the effects of defects in solids and published several books on the topic. In October 2010 he took over as president of the Institute of Physics, which publishes physicsworld.com. His duties for the Institute will for the moment be taken over by the Institute's immediate past-president Jocelyn Bell Burnell. Stoneham was born in Barrow-in-Furness on 18 May 1940. He completed a PhD in physics at the University of Bristol in 1965 and spent much of his career at the UK Atomic Energy Research Establishment (AERE) in Harwell, Oxfordshire, where he led the solid-state and quantum-physics group of the theoretical division between 1974 and 1989. The following year he was appointed director of research at AEA Industrial Technology and later took up the position of chief scientist of AEA Technology. In 1995 Stoneham moved to University College London, where he became director of the university's interdepartmental Centre for Materials Research. With his wife Doreen, who is also a physicist, Stoneham founded Oxford Authentication Ltd in 1997 and remained a director at the time of his death. The small firm uses thermoluminescence techniques to establish the provenance of earthenware, stoneware, porcelain and the casting cores of bronzes. Stoneham also served as vice-president of IOP Publishing, the publishing arm of the Institute, and was editor-in-chief of the Institute's Journal of Physics: Condensed Matter. In his spare time, Stoneham was an enthusiastic French horn player and even published two books in this area. He is survived by his wife Doreen and two daughters. In a statement, the Institute said that "he will be greatly missed by the physics community, and by all of us in the Institute". Stoneham had a wide range of research interests, including the electronic structure of defects, the properties of surfaces and interfaces, the true nature of scanning-probe microscopy and diamond films. However, in recent years he had taken a growing interest in quantum-information technology and hoped to create solid-state quantum gates that are compatible with silicon and could operate at room temperature. Stoneham was also involved in various projects linking physics and medicine, including one that sought to understand how humans can discriminate between different scents and whether left- and right-handed versions of chiral molecules should smell the same or not. About the author Hamish Johnston is editor of physicsworld.com Paul S. Martin (1928–2010): Luminary, Natural Historian, and Innovator C. Josh Donlan^1^,^2^*, Harry W. Greene^2^* 1 Advanced Conservation Strategies, Midway, Utah, United States of America, 2 Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, United States of America Citation: Donlan CJ, Greene HW (2011) Paul S. Martin (1928–2010): Luminary, Natural Historian, and Innovator. PLoS Biol 9(2): e1001016. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001016 Published: February 8, 2011 Copyright: © 2011 Donlan, Greene. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. * E-mail: jdonlan@advancedconservation.org (CJD); hwg5@cornell.edu (HWG) Paul Martin at Rampart Cave, home of the Shasta Ground Sloth, Grand Canyon, ca. 1975. Photo: Thomas R. Van Devender. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001016.g001 To behold the Grand Canyon without thoughts of its ancient condors, sloths, and goats is to be half blind—Paul S. Martin 1992 Paul S. Martin, a monumental figure in paleontology and ecology, died on September 13, 2010, at the age of 82. He wanted others to know, conveyed in a message from his wife, that when the time came, he would “die” and then be “dead.” He would not pass on, go gently, meet his maker, or go over to the other side. Paul combined an intense love for life, adventure, and natural history with innovative thinking, to an extent that is increasingly rare in today’s age of specialization. His impact on science was deep and transformative, cutting across many disciplines including ecology, paleontology, anthropology, and biodiversity conservation. Paul is best known for his work on the loss of America’s charismatic megafauna, from mastodons and mammoths to saber-toothed cats and sloths. He first published on the subject in 1958, and later authored seminal works on the subject [1]–[5]. Early in his career, Paul framed what has become one of the most enduring scientific whodunits of all time: what drove Late Pleistocene extinction—and what role did humans play? In 1966, writing about his “overkill hypothesis,” in which he indicted early humans for Pleistocene extinctions, Paul commented that it “is likely to continue to provoke serious and perhaps unanswerable objections” [5]. That turned out to be an understatement: the role of humans in Pleistocene extinction has been debated, often heatedly and almost continuously, for the last 50 years. While Paul relentlessly promoted the idea humans played the significant role in the demise of the Pleistocene megafauna, he embraced even his most critical dissenters—indeed, he invited criticism. His colleague Karl Flessa commented, “Paul really wanted to see things the way his opponents saw them, in order to understand even more about his favorite topic, Pleistocene extinctions." Paul’s 50-year journey with Pleistocene extinction is documented in his memoir Twilight of the Mammoths [6]. But Paul’s impact on science goes far beyond Pleistocene extinction. Paul Martin was a true Renaissance man—leveraging natural history to innovate new perspectives time and time again. In his monograph The Last 10,000 Years: A Fossil Pollen Record of the American Southwest, Paul took palynology (the study of pollen grains and other spores) to a far from obvious place: the dry lakes of Arizona. Edward Deevey, Paul’s post-doctoral supervisor, declared, “His pioneering work is exciting, not only for what it tells, but even more for what it promises: history, free of peat-bound preconceptions, in a land of little mud” [7]. Left wanting to unravel more tales of the ecological past, Paul then turned to packrat middens, helping to develop a new subdiscipline of paleontology that is among the most important tools of historical ecology [8]. His classic publication, Neotropical Anachronisms with Dan Janzen, changed the way ecologists view species interactions by elucidating the role of extinct vertebrates on contemporary ecology and life history traits [9]. Paul had a life-long love affair with Mexico and the country’s diverse flora and fauna. He spearheaded the Rio Mayo Project, updating Howard Scott Gentry’s Rio Mayo Plants: A Study of the Flora and Vegetation of the Valley of the Rio Mayo, Sonora [10], a project that involved 20+ years of field trips and the collection of over 15,000 specimens. From remote mangroves to ridge top conifer forests in the Sierra Madre Occidental, Paul traveled across one of Mexico’s most precious and inaccessible biomes—by bush plane, vehicle, burro, kayak, and foot. This was a remarkable feat for any biologist, even more extraordinary for a man that suffered from polio early in life and later relied on crutches. Born in Allentown, Pennsylvania, Paul earned his bachelor’s degree in zoology from Cornell University. From his teens through his eighth decade, Paul was all about fieldwork. By the time he graduated from Cornell in 1951, he had published papers on the natural history of bicolored hawks and black robins in western Mexico. Paul told us of grand times shooting birds for museum specimens with a shotgun out of the top floor of Cornell’s Fernow Hall, and of long road trips to the cloud forests of Tamaulipas, Mexico that involved an old jeep, binoculars, bad roads, and lots of flat tires. In those days, the 2000+-mile trip to Tamaulipas was likely worth a degree in itself. He went on to earn a Master’s and doctorate from the University of Michigan, studying the biogeography of amphibians and reptiles in those forests, an exercise in historical ecology that heavily influenced his life. Paul spent four years at Yale University and the University of Montreal as a post-doctoral researcher before moving to the Geochronology Laboratory at the University of Arizona in 1957. He would enjoy the rest of his career in Tucson, much of it as a professor of geosciences at the University’s Desert Laboratory, perched on Tumamoc Hill. Aside from his contributions to paleontology and ecology, Paul also influenced how we think about biodiversity conservation. For decades, almost single-handedly, he pondered the impact of megafaunal loss during the end of the Pleistocene on contemporary ecosystems: “Perhaps the long-lauded home where buffalo roam,” he wrote in 1969, “is also the land where camel and eland should play” [11]. His insights on the role of ecological history in biodiversity conservation culminated with the recent proposal of Pleistocene Rewilding, a call for science-based restoration of missing ecological functions and evolutionary potential of lost megafauna using extant conspecifics and related taxa [12],[13]. Paul was keenly aware that nativeness, place, and history are central to the science, strategies, and aesthetics of biodiversity conservation. His work was central in elucidating the all-to-common post-Columbian bias that blinds a paleoecological view of biodiversity and ecosystems. Another influential ecologist, Larry Slobodkin, died a year and a day before Paul Martin. Late in life Slobodkin was asked, “What do ecologists do?” He replied that it consists of choosing one of three paths and doing it well: the first was to become an expert on some group of organisms that excites you; the second was to master the most cutting-edge techniques; and the third, the most perilous path, was to “strenuously avoid doing what everyone else is doing and search for new ideas and new tests for old ideas” [14]. Paul Martin remarkably did all three brilliantly. The mystery of the Pleistocene extinction fascinated the naturalists of the 18th and 19th century, including Darwin, Wallace, Lyell, Owen, and Cuvier. Paul contributed more to solving this grand enigma than anyone living or dead. He was a pioneer in interdisciplinary research long before it was popular on academic campuses, and he sought new perspectives in natural history, often seizing on novel technologies to solve problems. But, Paul was more than that: he loved life and loved people. While our interactions with Paul were largely restricted to his later years, his influence on us—like many—was transformative. He even loved chiggers, harbingers of summer rain. One morning over coffee in the Arizona hill country, Paul declared with a big grin, “May the gods smile, the chiggers are rampant in the green hills of Sonoita these days.” References Top Martin P. S (1958) Pleistocene ecology and biogeography of North America. In: Hubbs C. L, editor. Zoogeography. Washington (D.C.): American Association for the Advancement of Science. pp. 375–420. Martin P. S (1973) The discovery of America. Science 179: 969–974. Find this article online Martin P. S, Klein R. G (1984) Quaternary extinctions : a prehistoric revolution. x. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.. 892p p. Martin P. S, Wright H. E, editors. (1967) Pleistocene extinctions: the search for a cause. New Haven: Yale University Press. 440p p. Martin P. S (1966) Africa and Pleistocene overkill. Nature 212: 339–342. Find this article online Martin P. S (2005) Twilight of the mammoths: ice age extinctions and rewilding America. Berkeley: University of California. 274p p. Martin P. S (1963) The last 10,000 years: a fossil pollen record of the American Southwest. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. 87p p. Betancourt J. L, Van Devender T. R, Martin P. S (1990) Packrat middens : the last 40,000 years of biotic change.Tucson: University of Arizona Press. vii467p. Find this article online Janzen D. H, Martin P. S (1982) Neotropical anachronisms: the fruits the gomphotheres ate. Science 215: 19–27. Find this article online Martin P. S, Yetman D. A, Fishbein M. E, Jenkins P. D, Devender T. R. V (1998) Gentry's Rio Mayo plants: the tropical deciduous forest and environs of northwest Mexico. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Martin P. S (1969) Wanted: a suitable herbivore. Natural History 78: 35–39. Find this article online Donlan C. J, Berger J, Bock C. E, Bock J. H, Burney D. A, et al. (2006) Pleistocene Rewilding: an optimistic agenda for 21st century conservation. American Naturalist 168: 660–681. Find this article online Donlan C. J, Greene H. W, Berger J, Bock C. E, Bock J. H, et al. (2005) Re-wilding North America. Nature 436: 913–914. Find this article online Futuyma D. J, Colwell R. K (2010) Lawrence B. Slobodkin (1928-2009): integrating theory, models, and experiments in ecology. PLoS Biol 12: e1000261. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1000261.

The NSF Nutrient Network has research sites dotted across the globe. Credit and Larger Version Data from Kinypanial Grassland in Australia led to new conclusions about invasive plants. Credit and Larger Version Silwood Park in the United Kingdom is another of 39 Nutrient Network sites in 8 countries. Credit and Larger Version The plants of Cowichan in British Columbia, Canada, added to the data on "home vs. away." Credit and Larger Version "Exclosure fencing" in Boulder, Colorado, marks the location of a Nutrient Network site. Credit and Larger Version

Willard S. Boyle, Father of Digital Eye, Dies at 86

By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Willard S. Boyle, who won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics for helping to develop a device that is at the heart of virtually every camcorder, digital camera and telescope in use, died on Saturday in Truro, Nova Scotia. He was 86.

His friend Stuart Semple said the death was “kidney related.”

Dr. Boyle’s prolific scientific career included inventing the first laser to be used in medicine and helping to choose sites on the moon for NASA’s manned landings.

But nothing eclipsed his invention — in only an hour — of the charge-coupled device, or CCD, with George E. Smith, his colleague at Bell Laboratories.

The device, smaller than a dime, has become ubiquitous. It is the eye behind every picture on the Internet, every digital and video camera, every computer scanner, copier machine and high-definition television.

Its work extends from supermarket barcode readers to the Hubble Space Telescope, from fax machines to the cameras that roamed Mars and the oceans’ floor.

It works by taking advantage of what is called the photoelectric effect, which was explained by Einstein and brought him the Nobel in 1921. The photoelectric effect is the name given to the observation that when light is shined onto a piece of metal, a small current flows through the metal.

The CCD devised by Dr. Boyle and Dr. Smith captures light and stores it, then displays it by converting it into electrical charges. “The challenge when designing an image sensor,” the Nobel committee said, “was to gather and read out the signals in a large number of image points, or pixels, in a short time.”

The effect, it continued, “transformed photography, as sight could now be captured electronically instead of on film.”

Dr. Boyle and Dr. Smith split half of the $1.4 million physics prize awarded by the Nobel committee. The other half went to Charles K. Kao for research that led to the development of fiber optic cables.

Willard Sterling Boyle was born on Aug. 19, 1924, in Amherst, Nova Scotia, and raised in the village of Wallace in the same province. He lived in Wallace at his death.

When he was 3, his family moved to northern Quebec, where his father, a doctor, set up a practice in a logging community. With the nearest school 30 miles away, his mother home-schooled Willard, and the family got around by dog sled.

For high school his parents sent him to Lower Canada College, a private school in Montreal. After graduating, he joined the Royal Canadian Navy and became a Spitfire pilot. He earned bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate degrees from McGill University in Montreal, then stayed on to work as a postdoctoral fellow in the school’s radiation laboratory.

After teaching at the Royal Military College in Kingston, Ontario, he joined the research staff of Bell Labs in Murray Hill, N.J., in 1953.

Dr. Boyle and a co-worker, Don Nelson, developed the ruby laser in 1962. With another colleague, David Thomas, he was given a patent that helped lead to the development of the semiconductor injection laser, which is found in many electronic appliances. In 1962 he was assigned to a Bell subsidiary that offered technical support to NASA. There he helped select lunar landing sites before returning to Bell labs in 1964.

Dr. Boyle credited the vigorous brainstorming sessions at Bell, often over coffee, for inspiring the CCD. He and Dr. Smith came up with the idea at a blackboard and immediately “knew we had something special,” he said in his Nobel lecture. The first model based on their idea worked after only an hour’s effort, Dr. Boyle said.

After Dr. Boyle and Dr. Smith won the Nobel, several other Bell scientists came forward to claim credit for the CCD discovery. They said the Nobel winners’ achievement, while legitimate, had nothing to do with imaging. These critics said that the original purpose of the work was to develop a memory circuit, and that that was what Dr. Boyle and Dr. Smith first thought they had accomplished.

Eugene Gordon said that he and another Bell researcher, Michael Tompsett, were at least as responsible for determining that the CCD could revolutionize all sorts of imaging. “They wouldn’t know an imaging device if it stared them in the face,” Dr. Gordon told the publication Digital Journal.

The first mention of the CCD as an imaging device in The New York Times was in 1978, crediting Dr. Tompsett with patenting a device that would yield video cameras small enough to fit in one’s palm. Its patent number was 4,085,456.

The patent number of the device Dr. Boyle and Dr. Smith developed was 3,858,232 and was granted four years earlier. Many contend that this patent paved the way for Dr. Tompsett’s work, the importance of which is not questioned. The Nobel committee does not publicly discuss its decisions.

Dr. Boyle defended his work. In an interview with Digital Journal, he said: “I can clearly remember the day that George and I developed the concept for the CCD. It’s pretty firm in my mind. I’ve documentation that disproves most of what they’re saying, and the rest of what they’re saying is not at all logical.”

Dr. Smith was more brusque, calling the detractors “liars.”

Dr. Boyle’s survivors include his wife of 65 years, the former Betty Joyce; a son; two daughters; 10 grandchildren; and at least one great-grandchild. Another son died last year.

After winning the Nobel, Dr. Boyle summarized his great achievement at a news conference: “We are the ones who started this profusion of little cameras all over the world.”

George W. Moore, prominent pathologist, dead at 65

A pioneer in medical informatics, he held appointments at Johns Hopkins Hospital and other institutions

April 10, 2011|By Nick Madigan, The Baltimore Sun

Dr. George William Moore, who had practiced pathology in Baltimore since 1976 and was a pioneer in the field of medical informatics, died April 4 after a long illness. He was 65.

During his career, Dr. Moore published hundreds of articles on pathology and computational medicine. His work in the closely related fields of medical informatics and pathology informatics, both of which emerged in the 1970s, was groundbreaking. Medical informatics covers the broad field of hospital computerization, while pathology informatics deals with the organization, retrieval and analysis of clinical laboratory data collected in medical centers.

Dr. Moore, celebrated for a fine singing voice as well as a prodigious beard, held appointments at Johns Hopkins Hospital, the University of Maryland School of Medicine and the Baltimore Veterans Affairs Medical Center. He developed a wide range of computational techniques for collecting and indexing the data contained in pathology reports. He also established novel statistical methods for analyzing the collected data.

He was born in Detroit and grew up in the suburb of Highland Park. He was educated in public schools and graduated at the top of his class at Highland Park High School in 1963.

He attended the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where he majored in cellular biology and earned a bachelor's degree in science. He received his doctorate in biomathematics from North Carolina State University at Raleigh. After a year of postdoctoral training at the University of Freiburg in Germany, Dr. Moore returned to Detroit, where he earned a medical degree from Wayne State University School of Medicine in 1976.

Five years earlier, he had married the former Barbara Lynne Struble. They had two sons, Geoffrey Walter Moore, who was born in 1974 and died three months ago, and Gregory Vincent Wayne Moore, born in 1980, who survives him.

Dr. Moore and his family moved to Baltimore in 1976, and lived most recently in Cedarcroft. In 1981, he completed an internship and residency in the pathology department at Hopkins, and stayed on as an assistant professor in pathology until 1989. That year, he accepted an appointment as associate professor at the University of Maryland School Of Medicine and continued to teach at Hopkins' various institutions. Also in 1989, Dr. Moore began practicing as a full-time pathologist at the VA Medical Center, a position he held until his death.

In 1967, Dr. Moore was named a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, and in 1980 received the Ludwig Aschoff Medal from the Medical Society of Freiburg. In 2007, he was named an honorary fellow by the Association for Pathology Informatics.

From 1957 until shortly before he died, Dr. Moore sang tenor in various chorus societies. He was particularly proud to have been a chorus member in a performance by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra in 1959, under the baton of Paul Paray, as well as a performance in 1966 of the University of Michigan Choral Union conducted by the Russian-born composer Igor Stravinsky. Most recently, Dr. Moore sang in the choir for the Episcopal Church of Christ the King, in Woodlawn, where he was a member of the congregation.

In addition to his wife and son, Dr. Moore is survived by a brother, James Michael Moore, and a sister, Kathleen Elizabeth Moore.

Horace Judson. (1931–2011)

doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001104.g001

Scientists, I once heard, have an easier time of it than composers and artists. In a “new” field, such as molecular biology, anything that happened more than three weeks ago is ancient history (as Sidney Brenner once said). We bold scientific searchers, like born agains, rise each morning to fashion a new world, with our own discoveries in the form of facts, lots of them (check out the lengths of the standard texts!). We ignore Emerson's dictum: “Our job is to turn fact into truth.”

In contrast, the composer awakens with the ever-present specter of Beethoven; the artist with that of Manet. Curiously, these practitioners of the arts, rather than avoiding the past, seem obsessed with it. Schumann spent hours playing and analyzing Schubert, especially the E-Flat Piano Trio. Brahms wrote pieces based on works by Weber and Chopin, and particularly loved Schumann's Carnival. Wagner wrote an essay on how to conduct Beethoven's Ninth, and Schoenberg said that his principal teachers were Mozart and Bach. Schumann advised aspiring composers to let Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier “be your daily bread—there is no end of learning”.

And the great painters never ceased their struggles to internalize the past. Manet learned from Velasquez, Goya, and Watteau. Picasso said his goal was to “make over Poussin based on nature.” In his manifesto of 1855 Coubert says, “I simply wanted to draw forth, from a complete acquaintance with tradition, the reasoned and independent consciousness of my own individuality.”

Could it be that there is more of a mindful thread in painting and composing than in science (in molecular biology, anyway)?

These thoughts occurred to me while re-reading The Eighth Day of Creation, Horace Freeland Judson's celebrated book, after learning of his death on May 6 at his Baltimore home. Born in Manhattan on April 21, 1931, and educated at the University of Chicago in the Hutchins College, Judson reported on the arts and sciences for Time magazine in the 1960s and later taught the history of science at Johns Hopkins University.

The Eighth Day, first published in 1979, is a gift that keeps on giving. It is not the completeness of his history, nor even the vivid prose that imparts its lasting effect. Rather, Judson had the drive and wit to probe until he understood not just who did what, and with what quirks of personality, but why they did it, and how they did it. At each stage he reveals what was at stake, what the crucial alternatives were, and how the problems were solved (or not, as the case may be). Who cares about this past, you might ask, we scientists being neither artists nor composers?

Could it be that—for scientists as well as composers and artists—the past can be a source of inspiration, and that we ignore it at our peril? Consider the question of how states of gene expression are conveyed from mother to daughters as cells divide. Are instructions passed along by regulatory proteins present in the cytoplasm (so-called “cytoplasmic determinants”), or is the information somehow built into, or attached to, the DNA and transferred along with it? Experiments performed by Francois Jacob and Jacques Monod and their colleagues at the Institut Pasteur in the 1960s distinguish between the models, strikingly supporting the first of these possibilities. These experiments (including the famous “zygotic induction” and “PaJaMa” experiments—see Judson's book) were, of course, performed with bacteria.

I recently spoke with an editor of a major journal that regularly publishes sensational papers on the question as it applies to higher organisms, and learned that s/he, like many of the journal's authors, had never heard of these bacterial experiments! You realize, reading Judson's book, that the challenge is to engage the thought processes of these French scientists, ponder their approaches and results, and design experiments of comparable power and clarity to confirm or refute their conclusions in a different setting. Without that engagement, the new answers are apt to be (and in my opinion usually are) baloney.

I have emphasized here just one bit of The Eighth Day, but it's a bit that reveals Judson's unique and remarkable contributions to our understanding of the way science works. The book, based on hundreds of hours of interviews and discussions, covers with equal insight adventures from the earliest days of molecular biology to (nearly) the present. When asked whether a new piece was any good, Stravinsky said “It is too early to tell”. Judson seems to have stepped in just at the right moment—the principal players were still around (as some are today), and yet events had followed so rapidly, one finding built on another, that there was no doubt our world had changed. Reading his book, we feel privileged to be part of a great intellectual tradition, and we thrill once again to the joy of understanding how we go about understanding the world.

Saul Roseman, chairman of Hopkins biology department, dies

Professor emeritus made discovery that corrected work of two Nobel laureates

Dr. Saul Roseman (July 6, 2011)

By Jacques Kelly, The Baltimore Sun

7:29 p.m. EDT, July 7, 2011

Saul Roseman, the retired chairman of the Johns Hopkins University's department of biology, whose scientific research included a discovery that corrected the work of two Nobel laureates, died of congestive heart failure Saturday at his home. He was 90 and lived in Pikesville.

His work focused on molecules on the surface of cells. As a young researcher, he found an error in the structure determined by other researchers of a major cell surface molecule, sialic acid, and presented scientific proof to back up his finding.

He was born in Brooklyn, N.Y. His father died when he was a boy and the family lived in poverty.

"He was a poor kid, the son of immigrants," said his son-in-law, Dr. Ronald Schnaar, a Johns Hopkins School of Medicine professor. "He was very bright in school and skipped grades and was often the youngest in his class. But he had a passion for knowledge."

He enrolled at the City College of New York and received a bachelor of science in chemistry, but also had minors in biology and physics.

"He was that kind of scientist," his son-in-law said. "He liked to integrate information."

He then did graduate work at the University of Wisconsin's biochemistry department and earned a master's degree before serving as a rifleman in the Army in Europe during World War II.

After his military service, he returned to the University of Wisconsin and completed his doctorate while studying with Karl Link, who discovered the anticoagulant warfarin, a coumarin derivative. As a doctoral student, Dr. Roseman tested the synthesis and metabolism of coumarin derivatives. In later life, he took the same drug to treat his heart condition.

In the 1950s, as a young researcher, Dr. Roseman earned the nickname Saul "Serendipity" Roseman. According to a biographical sketch, he was studying an enzyme that metabolizes sialic acid while he was an assistant professor at the University of Michigan. Two groups of scientists, including two Nobel laureates, had previously announced that they had determined the structure of sialic acid. During his research on enzymes, he found that there was a major error in the proposed structure. While looking for one thing, he found something else that was of great value to science.

"As a junior faculty member, he knew he had to nail down his proof and figure out why two Nobel laureates were wrong," his son-in-law said.

"As far as I'm concerned, serendipity is a major tool of scientific investigation, and many, many major discoveries in biology and medicine have come through it," Dr. Roseman said in remarks during a tribute to him in 2001. "Take the human brain, for example. We think there's about 100,000 different types of enzymatic reactions that take place in the human brain. When you start from scratch looking for something in that, the chances that you're going to find what you're looking for are pretty low."

The unexpected, he said at that time, is just nature's "way of telling researchers where to look for the really interesting and important stuff."

Dr. Roseman was brought to Hopkins as a professor in 1965. He served as chair of the biology department from 1969 to 1973 and from 1988 to 1990. He lectured in biochemistry to generations of Hopkins undergraduates. He also raised funds to help build Mudd Hall on the Homewood campus, where his lab remains. Although he formally retired and accepted the title emeritus this year, his laboratory continues his research to this day.

"Saul arrived at Johns Hopkins in 1965, and his time here as a biology professor was nothing short of prolific," said Katherine Newman, dean of the Hopkins Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. "Saul loved coming to the lab every day, and that enthusiasm inspired his students and his colleagues alike."

Dr. Roseman was married to Martha Ozrowitz, whom he met when they were children in Brooklyn. She is the former Hopkins dean of academic advising.

Dr. Roseman received numerous awards and honors, including his 1972 election to the National Academy of Sciences and an honorary medical degree from the University of Lund in Sweden.

Family members said Dr. Roseman adopted Baltimore enthusiastically. He had season tickets to the Colts, Orioles and later Ravens. He subscribed to the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and kept a sloop at Middle River.

Details of a memorial ceremony at the Johns Hopkins University planned for the fall are incomplete. A funeral was held Tuesday at Sol Levinson and Bros.

In addition to his wife of nearly 70 years, survivors include a son, Mark Roseman of Columbia; two daughters, Dorinda Gershman of Cleveland Heights, Ohio, and Cynthia Schnaar of Owings Mills; seven grandchildren; and 11 great-grandchildren.

jacques.kelly@baltsun.com

May 17, 2011

Maurice Goldhaber, Atomic Physicist, Is Dead at 100

By KENNETH CHANG

Maurice Goldhaber, a physicist who delved into the intricacies of atoms and headed the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island for more than a decade, died last Wednesday at his home in East Setauket, N.Y. He was 100.

Dr. Goldhaber was director of the Brookhaven lab from 1961 to 1973, overseeing experiments there that led to three Nobel Prizes.

His most famous contribution to science’s basic understanding of how the universe works involved the ghostly, perplexing subatomic particles known as neutrinos. Neutrinos, produced in the fusion of the Sun   and other stars and in the radioactive decay of elements, flood the universe; trillions of them zip through every person every second.

In the late 1950s, physicists discovered that neutrinos, unlike anything else in the universe known until then, appeared to violate mirror symmetry.

That was odd and unexpected, because looking in a mirror does not usually alter the rules of physics. For example, consider an archer shooting an arrow. As the arrow flies through the air, one could imagine the tail feathers rotating clockwise. In the mirror image of the arrow’s motion, the tail feathers would rotate counterclockwise. In either case, the motion of the arrow fits with Newton’s law of motion.

But the mirror versions of neutrinos were found to behave differently compared with those that exist in the real world, though what the neutrinos were doing was not precisely clear.

Dr. Goldhaber devised an experiment that was simple, elegant and unusually small; unlike most particle physics research, which employs expensive, behemoth accelerators, this one fit on a tabletop. By observing neutrino-producing transmutations between two carefully chosen elements, Dr. Goldhaber and his collaborators showed that neutrinos, unlike arrows, always rotate in one direction (counterclockwise, it turned out) and never the other.

For physicists seeking to catalog and explain the particles that fill the universe, “It clarified the situation unequivocally,” said Peter Bond, a senior physicist at Brookhaven.

Maurice Goldhaber was born April 18, 1911, in Lemberg, Austria. After beginning his physics studies at the University of Berlin, he earned his doctorate at Cambridge in 1936. He and another Cambridge scientist, James Chadwick, were the first to measure accurately the mass of a neutron.

He moved to the University of Illinois in 1938 and joined Brookhaven in 1950.

Dr. Goldhaber was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His honors include the National Medal of Science in 1983, the Wolf Prize in Physics in 1991 and the Enrico Fermi Award in 1999.

Physics runs through the Goldhaber lineage. His younger brother, Gerson, who died last year, was part of a team at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in California that confirmed the antiproton discovery.

His wife, Gertrude Scharff Goldhaber, was also a prominent nuclear physicist. One reason they moved to Brookhaven was that the laboratory offered both of them jobs; at Illinois, antinepotism laws dictated that she could not be hired on the faculty. She died in 1998.

Dr. Goldhaber’s son, Alfred Scharff Goldhaber, is a physics professor at Stony Brook University. A grandson, David Goldhaber-Gordon, is a physics professor at Stanford.

Dr. Goldhaber is also survived by another son, Michael H. Goldhaber, of Oakland, Calif.; a granddaughter; and four great-grandchildren.

Dr. Goldhaber officially retired in 1985 but continued to work at Brookhaven well into his 90s. “He had an idea a minute,” said Martin Blume, then editor in chief of the journals published by the American Physical Society. From about 2000 until 2008, he would drive Dr. Goldhaber to the lab each morning.

“I had a hard time keeping Maurice quiet,” Dr. Blume said. “He did not have very much sympathy for someone just trying to focus on getting there alive. Sometimes I had to put my hand across his face to stop him from talking.”

Dr. Goldhaber was also known among physicists for a bet he lost. At a party in 1954, he got into an argument with the host, Hartland Snyder, a theoretical physicist, over whether antiprotons — the antimatter version of protons — existed. “I don’t believe it until it is proven,” Dr. Goldhaber said to Dr. Snyder.

Dr. Snyder grabbed his hand and said, “ ‘I bet you $500 that the antiproton exists,’ ” Dr. Goldhaber recalled. “Without thinking, I said, ‘O.K.’ ”

Antiprotons were discovered the next year, and Dr. Goldhaber paid off the bet.

Willard S. Boyle, Father of Digital Eye, Dies at 86

By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Willard S. Boyle, who won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics for helping to develop a device that is at the heart of virtually every camcorder, digital camera and telescope in use, died on Saturday in Truro, Nova Scotia. He was 86.

His friend Stuart Semple said the death was “kidney related.”

Dr. Boyle’s prolific scientific career included inventing the first laser to be used in medicine and helping to choose sites on the moon for NASA’s manned landings.

But nothing eclipsed his invention — in only an hour — of the charge-coupled device, or CCD, with George E. Smith, his colleague at Bell Laboratories.

The device, smaller than a dime, has become ubiquitous. It is the eye behind every picture on the Internet, every digital and video camera, every computer scanner, copier machine and high-definition television.

Its work extends from supermarket barcode readers to the Hubble Space Telescope, from fax machines to the cameras that roamed Mars and the oceans’ floor.

It works by taking advantage of what is called the photoelectric effect, which was explained by Einstein and brought him the Nobel in 1921. The photoelectric effect is the name given to the observation that when light is shined onto a piece of metal, a small current flows through the metal.

The CCD devised by Dr. Boyle and Dr. Smith captures light and stores it, then displays it by converting it into electrical charges. “The challenge when designing an image sensor,” the Nobel committee said, “was to gather and read out the signals in a large number of image points, or pixels, in a short time.”

The effect, it continued, “transformed photography, as sight could now be captured electronically instead of on film.”

Dr. Boyle and Dr. Smith split half of the $1.4 million physics prize awarded by the Nobel committee. The other half went to Charles K. Kao for research that led to the development of fiber optic cables.

Willard Sterling Boyle was born on Aug. 19, 1924, in Amherst, Nova Scotia, and raised in the village of Wallace in the same province. He lived in Wallace at his death.

When he was 3, his family moved to northern Quebec, where his father, a doctor, set up a practice in a logging community. With the nearest school 30 miles away, his mother home-schooled Willard, and the family got around by dog sled.

For high school his parents sent him to Lower Canada College, a private school in Montreal. After graduating, he joined the Royal Canadian Navy and became a Spitfire pilot. He earned bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate degrees from McGill University in Montreal, then stayed on to work as a postdoctoral fellow in the school’s radiation laboratory.

After teaching at the Royal Military College in Kingston, Ontario, he joined the research staff of Bell Labs in Murray Hill, N.J., in 1953.

Dr. Boyle and a co-worker, Don Nelson, developed the ruby laser in 1962. With another colleague, David Thomas, he was given a patent that helped lead to the development of the semiconductor injection laser, which is found in many electronic appliances. In 1962 he was assigned to a Bell subsidiary that offered technical support to NASA. There he helped select lunar landing sites before returning to Bell labs in 1964.

Dr. Boyle credited the vigorous brainstorming sessions at Bell, often over coffee, for inspiring the CCD. He and Dr. Smith came up with the idea at a blackboard and immediately “knew we had something special,” he said in his Nobel lecture. The first model based on their idea worked after only an hour’s effort, Dr. Boyle said.

After Dr. Boyle and Dr. Smith won the Nobel, several other Bell scientists came forward to claim credit for the CCD discovery. They said the Nobel winners’ achievement, while legitimate, had nothing to do with imaging. These critics said that the original purpose of the work was to develop a memory circuit, and that that was what Dr. Boyle and Dr. Smith first thought they had accomplished.

Eugene Gordon said that he and another Bell researcher, Michael Tompsett, were at least as responsible for determining that the CCD could revolutionize all sorts of imaging. “They wouldn’t know an imaging device if it stared them in the face,” Dr. Gordon told the publication Digital Journal.

The first mention of the CCD as an imaging device in The New York Times was in 1978, crediting Dr. Tompsett with patenting a device that would yield video cameras small enough to fit in one’s palm. Its patent number was 4,085,456.

The patent number of the device Dr. Boyle and Dr. Smith developed was 3,858,232 and was granted four years earlier. Many contend that this patent paved the way for Dr. Tompsett’s work, the importance of which is not questioned. The Nobel committee does not publicly discuss its decisions.

Dr. Boyle defended his work. In an interview with Digital Journal, he said: “I can clearly remember the day that George and I developed the concept for the CCD. It’s pretty firm in my mind. I’ve documentation that disproves most of what they’re saying, and the rest of what they’re saying is not at all logical.”

Dr. Smith was more brusque, calling the detractors “liars.”

Dr. Boyle’s survivors include his wife of 65 years, the former Betty Joyce; a son; two daughters; 10 grandchildren; and at least one great-grandchild. Another son died last year.

After winning the Nobel, Dr. Boyle summarized his great achievement at a news conference: “We are the ones who started this profusion of little cameras all over the world.”

Baruj Benacerraf Dies

The Nobel Prize winner who discovered the gene that encodes the major histocompatibility complex passes away at age 90.

By Edyta Zielinska | August 3, 2011

Baruj BenacerrafNational Library of Medicine

Baruj Benacerraf, the geneticist and immunologist who earned the 1980 Nobel Prize for his discovery of the gene that governs the immune system’s reaction to foreign bodies, died on August 2, 2011 of pneumonia, at the age of 90.

Benacerraf started his Nobel Prize winning work with a chance observation. He had immunized a group of guinea pigs with a synthetic antigen, expecting to see all of the animals develop an immune response. But only about 40 percent of the rodents reacted, suggesting that individual genetic differences controlled the response. He then grouped the animals into responders and non-responders, and through a series of cross-mating experiments, confirmed that the response was controlled by a single dominant gene.

Interestingly, Benacerraf himself became allergic to guinea pigs as a result of the experiments, but it was “a small price to pay for the success of this project,” he wrote an autobiography published in the Annual Reviews of Immunology (ARJ) in 1991.

Hugh McDevitt and Allen Chinitz at Stanford University School of Medicine later discovered that Benacerraf’s “immune response” gene coded the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) molecule, which at the time was considered to be primarily involved in graft rejection. This connection illustrated that both graft rejection and pathogen rejection were mediated by the same molecule, and led the way for an understanding of autoimmune disease, organ transplantation, and differences in how individuals in a population respond to the same pathogen.

However, it isn’t Benacerraf’s big discoveries that his former students remember most, but his passion for science. “There was that sparkle in his eye, a snap in his fingers” when you brought him an interesting result, said Ronald Germain, a section head at the Laboratory of Immunology at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), and a student of Benacerraf at Harvard in the 1970s.

It was data, not prestige, that mattered, agreed Steven Burakoff, director of the Tisch Cancer Institute at Mount Sinai Medical Center, who worked with Benacerraf and Germain at Harvard. Benacerraf wasn’t concerned with where you were publishing, or giving a talk, Burakoff said. “He felt that if you focused on the research, and the quality of the data, and the insights it provided, everything would come from that.”

Benacerraf began his career as a doctor, but switched to immunology because of an intellectual curiosity that stemmed from his experience with asthma as a child. After completing his medical training and serving in World War II as a first lieutenant, Benacerraf returned to New York City and found a position working with young immunochemist Elvin Kabat at Columbia University. He credited Kabat with teaching him a deep respect for rigorous and quantitative science.

Eventually, Benacerraf started his own laboratory at New York University’s School of Medicine, where he completed his Nobel Prize-winning work. It was there he also began mentoring students, which he considered the most rewarding part of his career. “He regarded [his postdocs] as part of his larger family,” said William Paul, chief of the Laboratory of Immunology at the NIAID. “He loved to be challenged,” and would surround himself students who would do just that, said Paul.

But his students had to earn his esteem, Germain added. “You never crossed the threshold to his office [without] a knock and a ‘please come in’ permission. The goal was to get to the point where you could switch from ‘Professor Benacerraf’ to ‘Baruj,’ and where you could lightly tap and walk in,” said Germain, who says he eventually enjoyed a “reasonably close” relationship with Benacerraf.

After NYU, Benacerraf directed the Laboratory of Immunology at the NIAID for two years. He then was invited to be the chair of department of pathology at Harvard Medical School, and was appointed president of the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in 1980.

Over the course of his career, Benacerraf’s papers were cited more than 38,000 times, according to ISI. His most highly-cited paper, “The histocompatibility-linked immune response genes,” (Adv Cancer Res, 21:121-73, 1975), was cited some 1,200 times.

He is survived by his daughter Beryl. His wife Annette Dreyfus died in June.

Horace Judson (1931–2011)

* E-mail: m-ptashne@mskcc.org

Horace Judson.

doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001104.g001

Scientists, I once heard, have an easier time of it than composers and artists. In a “new” field, such as molecular biology, anything that happened more than three weeks ago is ancient history (as Sidney Brenner once said). We bold scientific searchers, like born agains, rise each morning to fashion a new world, with our own discoveries in the form of facts, lots of them (check out the lengths of the standard texts!). We ignore Emerson's dictum: “Our job is to turn fact into truth.”

In contrast, the composer awakens with the ever-present specter of Beethoven; the artist with that of Manet. Curiously, these practitioners of the arts, rather than avoiding the past, seem obsessed with it. Schumann spent hours playing and analyzing Schubert, especially the E-Flat Piano Trio. Brahms wrote pieces based on works by Weber and Chopin, and particularly loved Schumann's Carnival. Wagner wrote an essay on how to conduct Beethoven's Ninth, and Schoenberg said that his principal teachers were Mozart and Bach. Schumann advised aspiring composers to let Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier “be your daily bread—there is no end of learning”.

And the great painters never ceased their struggles to internalize the past. Manet learned from Velasquez, Goya, and Watteau. Picasso said his goal was to “make over Poussin based on nature.” In his manifesto of 1855 Coubert says, “I simply wanted to draw forth, from a complete acquaintance with tradition, the reasoned and independent consciousness of my own individuality.”

Could it be that there is more of a mindful thread in painting and composing than in science (in molecular biology, anyway)?

These thoughts occurred to me while re-reading The Eighth Day of Creation, Horace Freeland Judson's celebrated book, after learning of his death on May 6 at his Baltimore home. Born in Manhattan on April 21, 1931, and educated at the University of Chicago in the Hutchins College, Judson reported on the arts and sciences for Time magazine in the 1960s and later taught the history of science at Johns Hopkins University.

The Eighth Day, first published in 1979, is a gift that keeps on giving. It is not the completeness of his history, nor even the vivid prose that imparts its lasting effect. Rather, Judson had the drive and wit to probe until he understood not just who did what, and with what quirks of personality, but why they did it, and how they did it. At each stage he reveals what was at stake, what the crucial alternatives were, and how the problems were solved (or not, as the case may be). Who cares about this past, you might ask, we scientists being neither artists nor composers?

Could it be that—for scientists as well as composers and artists—the past can be a source of inspiration, and that we ignore it at our peril? Consider the question of how states of gene expression are conveyed from mother to daughters as cells divide. Are instructions passed along by regulatory proteins present in the cytoplasm (so-called “cytoplasmic determinants”), or is the information somehow built into, or attached to, the DNA and transferred along with it? Experiments performed by Francois Jacob and Jacques Monod and their colleagues at the Institut Pasteur in the 1960s distinguish between the models, strikingly supporting the first of these possibilities. These experiments (including the famous “zygotic induction” and “PaJaMa” experiments—see Judson's book) were, of course, performed with bacteria.

I recently spoke with an editor of a major journal that regularly publishes sensational papers on the question as it applies to higher organisms, and learned that s/he, like many of the journal's authors, had never heard of these bacterial experiments! You realize, reading Judson's book, that the challenge is to engage the thought processes of these French scientists, ponder their approaches and results, and design experiments of comparable power and clarity to confirm or refute their conclusions in a different setting. Without that engagement, the new answers are apt to be (and in my opinion usually are) baloney.

I have emphasized here just one bit of The Eighth Day, but it's a bit that reveals Judson's unique and remarkable contributions to our understanding of the way science works. The book, based on hundreds of hours of interviews and discussions, covers with equal insight adventures from the earliest days of molecular biology to (nearly) the present. When asked whether a new piece was any good, Stravinsky said “It is too early to tell”. Judson seems to have stepped in just at the right moment—the principal players were still around (as some are today), and yet events had followed so rapidly, one finding built on another, that there was no doubt our world had changed. Reading his book, we feel privileged to be part of a great intellectual tradition, and we thrill once again to the joy of understanding how we go about understanding the world.

http://www.arkive.org/thylacine/thylacinus-cynocephalus/video-00.html

George W. Bush’s Science Advisor Dies

John Marburger became a lightning rod for criticism that the Bush administration had politicized climate change science and human embryonic stem cell research.

By Tia Ghose | August 2, 2011

John MarburgerWikimedia Commons, Oak Ridge National Laboratory

John H. Marburger III, George W. Bush’s controversial science advisor, died of lymphoma last week at age 70.

Marburger, a physicist, headed The White House Office of Science and Technology for 8 years. During that time, he took heat for defending the Bush administration’s positions on climate change, abstinence-only education, and the use of human embryonic stem cells for basic research.  In 2004, he came under fire for defending the administration against the National Academy of Science’s  assertion that politics were skewing government agency research.

Even now, it is unclear whether Marburger, a lifelong democrat, publicly supported the administration’s policies out of conviction or a sense of duty. In 2004 he told an interviewer that his role was to “make sure science input to policy making is sound,” and that while he was on the job,  “no one will know my personal positions on issues,” The New York Times reports.

Marburger was noted as a calm, level-headed manager who “brought peace and rationality to controversial issues,” longtime friend and fellow science administrator William Madia told ScienceInsider.

Before coming to the White House, Marburger headed the State University of New York at Stonybrook and was director of the Brookhaven National Laboratory. He is survived by his wife, two sons, and a grandson.

Dr. Joseph Vincent Brady, behavioral neuroscientist, dies

Called the "Father of Behavioral Pharmacology," he also trained first primates, or Astrochimps, that traveled into space

Dr. Joseph V. Brady (August 2, 2011)

By Frederick N. Rasmussen, The Baltimore Sun

4:04 p.m. EDT, August 2, 2011

Joseph Vincent Brady, a nationally and internationally known behavioral neuroscientist, behavioral pharmacologist and space researcher who established the department of behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, died Friday of multiple organ failure at Gilchrist Hospice Care in Towson.

The Fells Point resident was 89.

"Joe was an institution at Hopkins and made significant institutional changes both here and at Homewood. He was also the father of the complete treatment plan for patients with substance abuse," said Dr. J. Raymond DePaulo Jr., director of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Hopkins School of Medicine.

"Because of his work, he became a leading expert on behavioral substance abuse and addiction. His insight was that the addicted wouldn't stay in treatment unless they were given blockers. He believed in and practiced what is now known as stepped care," said Dr. DePaulo, who is also psychiatrist-in-chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital.

The son of a lawyer and a homemaker, Dr. Brady was born in New York City and raised in Brooklyn, where he was a graduate of St. Michaels High School.

After earning a bachelor's degree in 1943 from Fordham University, Dr. Brady enlisted in the Army, where he served in the European Theater as a combat infantry platoon leader.

After the war, he attended the University of Chicago, where he earned his doctorate in 1951 and where his doctoral research on conditioned anxiety and drug effects later became a model for modern behavioral pharmacology.

From 1951 to 1963, Dr. Brady was an investigator in neurobehavioral science at the Walter Reed Institute in Washington, and from 1964 to 1970, was deputy director of neuropsychiatry.

Dr. Brady's landmark paper in 1956 studied the effects of reserpine, a drug that is used to treat high blood pressure and severe agitation, on patients suffering from anxiety. It was one of the first papers of the modern era to demonstrate the usefulness of behavioral conditioning in animals and to study the effects of psychotic drugs.

Dr. Brady's subsequent efforts to convince pharmaceutical companies of the value of these methods for screening behavioral effects of drugs led to the establishment of the field of behavioral pharmacology.

Among the many important discoveries of Dr. Brady's interdisciplinary neuroscience team was the finding that psychological stress could be far more damaging than physical stress.

It was Dr. Brady's 1958 article in Scientific American, "Ulcers in Executive Monkeys," that became a seminal work and a textbook example of how environmental stress can lead to illness.

In 1957, he received a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health to establish a psychopharmacology laboratory at the University of Maryland, College Park.

During this time, Dr. Brady and two of his students demonstrated that monkeys will self-administer drugs and that they were fit to be candidates for today's nonhuman models for drug abuse studies.

In addition, Dr. Brady was director of the space research laboratory at Maryland, where he oversaw the training of several monkeys for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Those he trained included Able, Baker and Ham, who became the first astrochimp for NASA.

Ham, a 3-foot-tall, 37-pound chimpanzee, made history when he became the first chimp in the United States to rocket into space Jan. 31, 1961.

The chimp, who rode a Redstone rocket in a suborbital flight 414 miles down range from Cape Canaveral, Fla., at 5,800 mph, emerged from his 16-minute voyage unscathed.

The training of space voyager monkeys paved the way for the subsequent flight that May of astronaut Alan Shepard and John H. Glenn's historic 1962 orbital space flight.

Dr. Brady continued his association with NASA by working on the development of programmed human environments at Maryland, and he later established the Programmed Environmental Research Center at Hopkins.

He remained in the Army until being discharged with the rank of colonel in 1970, when he went to work at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine's Division of Behavioral Biology of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences.

Dr. Paul R. McHugh, who was director of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Hopkins School of Medicine from 1975 to 2001, had known Dr. Brady when they had worked together at Walter Reed.

"He was a deep and abiding friend of mine. I used to work for him and then he worked for me at Hopkins," said Dr. McHugh, who also had been psychiatrist-in-chief at the hospital.

"As a scientist, Joe had an early grasp on behavior addiction and other misadventures of life. He encouraged people to move away from normal addiction treatment," said Dr. McHugh. "He fundamentally changed how we treat addicted people."

Dr, McHugh described him as "good-hearted and a man who had many great gifts."

"Over the years, I found him to be the most genial kind of colleague who helped advance me when I was a junior student. He advanced so many and made their careers," he said. "He also was never jealous of anyone or anybody."

In 1960, Dr. Brady founded the nonprofit Institute for Behavioral Resources, whose purpose was to enhance the scientific understanding of behavior and to apply behavioral principles to the solution of human problems.

IBR also served as the venue to study the effectiveness of a mobile methadone treatment unit in Baltimore, which became a successful program and a model for bringing treatment services to underserved communities.

In 2001, Dr. Brady purchased a six-story building on Maryland Avenue to house IBR's corporate offices and research laboratories. The building also is the permanent home for a thriving and innovative substance abuse treatment program that serves more than 500 patients daily.

"Joe was extremely energetic and enthusiastic. He was everywhere and always cheerful and optimistic," recalled Dr. DePaulo. "He was one of those people you could hear laughing a hallway away. It's hard to believe he's gone because I can still hear him."

His many professional memberships included the American Psychological Association, Pavlovian Society, Society of Behavioral Medicine, Behavioral Pharmacology Society, and the College on the Problems of Drug Dependence.

Dr. Brady, who wrote widely in his various fields, garnered many awards and honors including the American Psychological Association's Distinguished Scientific Award.

The award's citation stated that Dr. Brady "has had a breadth of vision, an undaunted enthusiasm, and a degree of dedication that is unparalleled and is a continued inspiration to countless students and colleagues."

Dr. Brady, a resident of Henderson's Wharf since the mid-1980s, "had not retired at his death," said his wife of 26 years, the former Nancy Heaton.

Dr. Brady will be interred in a private service at Arlington National Cemetery.

Also surviving are a son, Michael Brady of San Clemente, Calif.; four daughters, Barbara Finchman of Shipman, Va., Dr. Kathleen Brady of Charleston, S.C., Nancy Brady of Tucson, Ariz., and Joanne Brady of San Diego; a stepdaughter, Dr. Meg Sullivan of Ennis, Texas; a brother, James Brady of Brooklyn, N.Y.; 13 grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren. His first wife, the former Cecilia O'Malley, died in 1967; his third wife, Julia Dawson, died in 1994. A second marriage ended in divorce.

August 15, 2011

George C. Devol, Inventor of Robot Arm, Dies at 99

By JEREMY PEARCE

George C. Devol, a largely self-taught inventor who drew from science fiction to help develop Unimate, the revolutionary mechanical arm that became a prototype for robots now widely used on automobile assembly lines and in other industries, died on Thursday at his home in Wilton, Conn. He was 99.

His death was confirmed by his son Robert.

In the early 1950s, before the advent of industrial robotics, Mr. Devol (pronounced de-VAHL) built on his own work in electrical engineering and machine controls to design a mechanical arm that could be programmed to repeat precise tasks, like grasping and lifting.

He applied for a patent in 1954 and explained the concept to a fellow engineer, Joseph F. Engelberger, at a cocktail party where they discussed their favorite science fiction writers. Mr. Engelberger listened with interest and immediately seized on the significance of the new technology.

Mr. Devol named the concept Universal Automation — later shortened to Unimation — and received a patent in 1961. Mr. Engelberger formed a company, Unimation Inc., of Danbury, Conn., to adapt and apply the ideas of Mr. Devol and other innovators, and soon came up with the Unimate, an early and highly successful effort to replace factory workers with robotic machinery.

In 1961, General Motors put the first Unimate arm on an assembly line at the company’s plant in Trenton. The device was used to lift and stack die-cast metal parts taken hot from their molds.

Chrysler and Ford soon followed, in the face of resistance from labor unions, and Unimates designed for welding, spray-painting, applying adhesives and other potentially hazardous jobs were in production by 1966.

The Japanese were particularly receptive to the Unimation vision of mobile and remotely controlled robots, using them in industry and in service applications, like hospitals.

In 2002, Popular Mechanics magazine listed the Unimate as one of the top 50 inventions of the last 50 years. An early model is in the collection at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History.

In May of this year, Mr. Devol was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. The citation states, in part, “George Devol’s patent for the first digitally operated programmable robotic arm represents the foundation of the modern robotics industry.”

His associate, Mr. Engelberger, became an internationally recognized voice for the promise of robotics, appearing on “The Tonight Show“ in 1966 with a Unimate, which sank a putt, led the orchestra, and opened and poured a can of beer. Unimation eventually expanded to 1,000 employees and was acquired by Westinghouse in the early 1980s.

Mr. Devol later opened a scientific consulting business in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and continued to work on refining visual and touch sensors for robots, among other challenges.

In 1983, he said that a robot must “be able to receive and use information from computers and give information to computers.” He said the next step in the evolution of robotics was standardized designs worldwide to allow robots to communicate and work directly with one another.

George Charles Devol Jr. was born Feb. 20, 1912, in Louisville, Ky. An experimenter from an early age, he studied mechanics and electronics in high school, but did not attend college. He worked for electronics companies in the 1920s, and in the early 1930s founded a small company, United Cinephone, to develop recording technology for movies.

That initial venture was not fruitful, and Mr. Devol turned his inventor’s hand to making devices that open doors automatically and other devices using machine controls. He also found a way to make laundry presses open or close when a worker approached. In 1939 United Cinephone installed automated photoelectric counters at the New York World’s Fair to count entering customers.

In the 1940s, Mr. Devol helped in an early application of the microwave oven, with the introduction of a machine for cooking and vending hot dogs, known as the “Speedy Weeny.”

Mr. Devol’s wife, Evelyn, died in 2003. Besides his son Robert, survivors include his daughters, Christine Wardlow and Suzanne Judkins; another son, George C. III; five grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.

Mr. Devol said that new technology should be simple and practical.

“We should take refuge in the fact that very crude systems can accomplish an awful lot,” he once said. “Elegant capabilities are nice, but often unnecessary.”

August 15, 2011, 4:18 pm

Lennart Philipson.

Lennart Philipson died on June 26, 2011. His passing is a great loss to the worldwide biomedical research community. He was a big man—physically, emotionally and operationally, dominating rooms, psyches and institutions. He was my wonderful friend, and when Lennart became your friend, it filled a big need in your life.

Lennart was a Swedish virologist/microbiologist who earned both an MD and a PhD in 1957–1958, the latter for work on respiratory viruses. He then went to the Rockefeller University for post-doctoral work in virology, returning after a couple of years to the Wallenberg Laboratory in Sweden's Uppsala University, where he established his own laboratory. It happened that I entered the Rockefeller University just after Lennart left and did my thesis work on the same floor where he had worked. You could still feel his presence. So many ice buckets had his name on them, and if you paged back in the centrifuge log, it was all Philipson. People talked about his energy, his intensity, and his formidable persona. I was excited to meet him on a return trip to the United States and quickly saw why he was so unforgettable.

Virology has enjoyed a golden era over the past 50 years, largely because advances in molecular methods could be rapidly applied to viruses to uncover remarkable molecular details. Lennart flourished in this environment, quickly rising to prominence as he concentrated first on picornaviruses and then on adenoviruses. Always staying au courant with the latest technology, Lennart was poised to ride each new wave of technological advance as it unfolded. He is particularly noted for his work on the cellular receptors for viruses, on the assembly of adenoviruses, and on the control of adenovirus gene expression, but he made contributions to fields as disparate as serology and structure determination and everything in between. He later studied genes that inhibit cellular growth.

Lennart did a sabbatical in my laboratory and quickly made himself at home: soon I wondered if he or I was running the show. He orchestrated a very important set of experiments, showing that synthesis of the reverse transcriptase in murine retroviruses comes about by suppression of a termination codon. This work solved the vexing puzzle of how, from one open reading frame, a major and a minor product could emerge. I had a chance to see up close what a force of nature he could be in the laboratory.

Lennart was not only an important scientist, he was also a great institutional builder and administrator of science. By 1967 he had become the Director of the Wallenberg Laboratory and went on to play important roles in Swedish science. In 1982, his remarkable skills were recognized on the European level by his appointment as the second Director General of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), which he ran until 1993. There he established a balance between work on instrumentation and on scientific objectives, insisting that most group leaders stay for only a fixed time so as to generate a constant renewal of the staff. It was an inspired policy: many of the leading scientists throughout Europe got their start at EMBL. He also redirected the scientific focus toward cellular and developmental biology. Among his many innovations at EMBL, Lennart realized that computation was becoming an important part of biomedical research and opened an outstation for biocomputation that has been a major European window on the growing world of genomic research.

In 1993 Lennart returned to the US to be the Founding Director of the Skirball Institute of Biomolecular Medicine at the New York University School of Medicine. He set high standards for recruitment and brought a very strong group to Skirball. He spent five years in New York, setting up Skirball's structure and establishing it as an important unit within NYU. Many of the people he recruited are still at Skirball; he set them on a trajectory of accomplishment and leadership. Today, in fact, one of his recruits, Ruth Lehmann, is its director. This legacy is a notable example of what can be accomplished in a semi-independent institute within a larger academic structure.

After leaving Skirball, Lennart returned to Stockholm, Sweden, where he joined the Karolinska Institute and was Emeritus Professor of Microbiology there when he passed away. He stayed active in science and was an author on a publication in 2011 describing the consequences of a knockout of a receptor shared by coxsackieviruses and adenoviruses. It was a protein he had discovered almost 15 years earlier.

He had been a foreign member of the US National Academy of Sciences since 1992 and, of course, was a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. He consulted with many companies, notably Astra in Sweden. He had many honorary degrees.

Yet, science was not Lennart's only passion. He was devoted to his family. His wife, Malin, was a partner in all the challenges Lennart took on and remains a gracious friend to all of Lennart's associates. His boys were the apple of his eye and their successes in life were a source of great pride. Swedes know how to do summer, and for Lennart and Malin, their summer home was a key release from the pressures of busy lives. Lennart was an excellent sailor; he even spent two years at sea when he was young. He and Malin, along with my wife and I and many other friends, rented sailing boats around the world. Our most remarkable time was sailing in the northern islands of the Kingdom of Tonga, in the South Pacific. Lennart was a remarkable captain who let others run the ship until that moment when leadership and experience were needed—then he took over and got the ship through the tough patch.

All who knew Lennart will remember him with a pipe in his mouth, furiously smoking the Prince Albert tobacco he imported from the US. He would leave residues of his tobacco on the sides of the boats we sailed because he tamped out the ashes of used tobacco on the boat's gunwale.

Lennart was a rare and irreplaceable person, a true individual. His science was path-finding, his leadership strong and imaginative, his friendship deep. He will be missed by all who knew him.

Editor's note: The editors at PLoS Biology recognize the life and work of Lennart Philipson and are grateful for his years of service on the journal's editorial board.

August 17, 2011

Fritz Bach, Who Aided Transplant Survival, Dies at 77

By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Dr. Fritz H. Bach, a physician and medical researcher who helped develop techniques to improve people’s chances of surviving organ and bone marrow transplants, died Sunday at his home in Manchester-by-the-Sea, Mass. He was 77.

The cause was cardiac arrest, his son Peter said.

In a transplant, a major worry is that the body will reject the new organ. So the goal is to find as compatible a donor as possible. A kidney transplant between identical twins in 1954 had proved to work, but most people needing transplants do not have twins.

Dr. Bach’s seminal contribution was to develop a process for systematically mixing cells from the patient with cells from potential donors until a donor is found whose cells do not react adversely with those of the patient. The technique provides a measure of how compatible the tissues from the two bodies are likely to be. The more likely, the less the possibility of rejection.

In the 1960s, Dr. Bach applied his approach to bone marrow, which contains the stem cells that produce the body’s blood cells.

In the 1950s, scientists had succeeded in transplanting bone marrow into people whose own marrow had been ravaged by nuclear radiation or cancer-killing chemicals. By the late 1960s, doctors were beginning to try transplants on different kinds of patients. Dr. Bach’s techniques made it possible to determine in advance that antibodies from the donor and the patient would not fight to the death.

His primary procedure was used twice in 1968. The first use was when Dr. Robert A. Good, considered the father of immunology, saved the life of a 5-month-old boy who had been born with a bone marrow defect. Then Dr. Bach led a team that operated on a 2-year-old boy who bled constantly and suffered repeated infections. In both cases, bone marrow from a sister was used for the transplant.

In 1975, Dr. Bach announced a way to speed up his process of analysis to hours, rather than days. That made it applicable to transplants of cadaver kidneys, which must be used within 48 hours. Adding to the efficiency of his technique, he described how infection-fighting white blood cells could be classified and frozen for use in screening many potential donors. His work on the compatibility of donors paved the way for experiments that led to the identification of the Major Histocompatibility Complex, a large gene family whose molecules play an important role in the immune system.

Fritz Heinz Bach was born into a Jewish family in Vienna on April 5, 1934. After Nazis and their sympathizers attacked Jews in planned riots called Kristallnacht, or Night of broken glass, in November 1938, Fritz and his older brother fled to England. They were among nearly 10,000 mainly Jewish children rescued by the British and put in the care of British families. They later reunited with their family in Bath, England. An American soldier sponsored their emigration to the United States, and they settled in Burlington, Vt.

Dr. Bach graduated from Harvard in 1955 with a degree in physical science. He studied medicine at Washington University in St. Louis and Harvard Medical School, from which he received an M.D. in 1960. He taught and did research at the University of Wisconsin, the University of Minnesota and the Columbia and Harvard medical schools. He published more than 800 scientific papers.

Dr. Bach was married twice, to Marilyn Lee Brenner and Jeanne Elizabeth Gose. Survivors include his six children, David, Peter, Wendy, Kathryn, Erika and Dana, all of whom have his last name; and four grandchildren.

In recent years, Dr. Bach was concerned with transplanting pig organs to humans as a way to alleviate a persistent shortage in organs to transplant. He worried that swine tissue could unleash new diseases in humans, and did scientific research on ways to stop this. He advised proceeding, but methodically, and involving the public — not just experts — in making decisions about literally mixing species.

Dr. Bach’s many awards included the Peter Medawar Award of the Transplantation Society. His life came full circle in 2004 when the University of Vienna, where he had started a laboratory and was training young scientists, gave him an honorary doctorate.

In recent years he found evidence that carbon monoxide, inhaled at very low concentrations, could help damaged arteries. He was also working to find ways for people to tolerate transplants without having to take medication for the rest of their lives.

He treasured a photo taken of him early in his career, in which he is shown delivering a lecture on a new genetic hypothesis he had constructed. It turned out to be completely wrong.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: August 19, 2011

An obituary and a headline on Thursday about Dr. Fritz H. Bach, who helped develop techniques to help improve people’s chances of surviving organ and bone marrow transplants, misstated his age. He was 77, not 76. (As the obituary correctly noted, he was born on April 5, 1934.)

October 2, 2011

Michael J. Drake, Planetary Scientist, Dies at 65

By PAUL VITELLO

Michael J. Drake, a planetary scientist, worked on many NASA space missions in his lifetime. But he remained devoted to one idea that he proposed several times in the last decade and that NASA officials rejected twice: to send a spacecraft to an asteroid, take rock samples from the surface and bring them home to study the origins of life.

The expedition finally received NASA’s approval on May 24 after a grueling two-year review process, during which Dr. Drake continued working despite receiving a diagnosis of liver cancer and undergoing liver transplant surgery.

His exhilaration about the go-ahead sustained him as his health declined in recent months, and it kept him involved in plans for the mission’s 2016 launching “to his last breath,” said his wife, Gail Georgenson. He died on Sept. 21 in Tucson. He was 65.

Dr. Drake, the head of the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona, was a leader in the field of extraterrestrial geology. He studied lunar rocks, meteors and the moons of Saturn. He helped map the surface of Mars and was part of a NASA team that detected the presence of ice below the Martian surface in 2002.

But Dr. Drake, like many planetary scientists, considered asteroids the most promising frontier for exploring what he described in his writing as the “big picture questions.”

In an interview shortly after NASA announced its decision to finance the asteroid mission, which is dubbed Osiris-Rex, he listed some of the questions he hoped it would help answer: “Where do we come from? How did we come to exist? What’s the origin of the organic material that provided the building blocks that led to life?” he said.

Asteroids are considered the original stuff of the solar system — leftover scraps from the cataclysmic nebula collapse in which the solar system was formed 4.5 billion years ago. They were relatively untouched by collisions and other events that might have incinerated the surfaces of larger bodies like the planets, changing the molecular structure of their original terrains. A sample from the surface of an asteroid might prove (or disprove) one of planetary science’s big emerging theories: that the Earth was scorched and barren until it was “reseeded” eons ago by asteroids.

“We already know that amino acids exist in space, and we find them in some meteorites: chipped-off asteroids that strike Earth,” Dr. Drake said. “We believe it’s the sort of stuff that came in through the Earth’s atmosphere and provided the building blocks of life.”

“The asteroid is literally a time capsule of 4.5 billion years,” he added.

Michael Julian Drake was born on July 8, 1946, in Bristol, England, to Betty Eileen Mary and Allen Drake. He graduated with a degree in geology from Victoria University in Manchester and received his Ph.D. in 1972 from the University of Oregon.

After postdoctoral studies at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Mass., he joined the faculty of the University of Arizona in 1973. He met his wife and remained in Tucson for the rest of his life.

Besides his wife, he is survived by their two children, Matthew and Melissa; a granddaughter; and his father and sister, Lisbeth, of East Sussex, England.

Along with colleagues, Dr. Drake worked on the Cassini mission to explore Saturn; the Gamma-Ray Spectrometer aboard the Mars Odyssey Orbiter, which first detected Mars’s ice; and the Phoenix Mars Lander, which landed in 2008 in search of Martian water and microbial life.

The NASA asteroid mission, which will cost $800 million, is basically as Dr. Drake proposed it: a spacecraft will travel to an asteroid known as 1999-RQ36, a rock about the size of Grand Central Terminal somewhere between Mars and Jupiter. The trip will take about four years. Robotic devices on the spacecraft will take measurements, photographs and readings, then scoop about two ounces of material from the asteroid’s surface to be sent back to Earth in a capsule, which is scheduled to land on the floor of the Utah desert sometime in 2023.

A secondary but not insignificant goal of the mission, as Dr. Drake designed it, will be figuring out how the trajectory of an asteroid like RQ36 might be changed if it ever happened to be heading in our direction.

Two criteria were used in selecting RQ36 as the mission’s destination, Dr. Drake said. The asteroid seemed from telescope studies to be rich in carbon and other elements found in organic compounds, making it a good candidate for testing the life-came-from-a-meteor theory.

Second, the path of RQ36’s orbit put it on a course for a possible collision with Earth in 2086. (NASA calculates the chance of that as one in 1,800.) Measurements taken by the spacecraft will help determine what kind of human-sent shove or bump, in the worst-case scenario, might keep that from happening.

On the day NASA announced its plan for the Osiris-Rex mission, an elated Dr. Drake summed up its scope. It would be about nothing less than “the origin and destiny of humanity,” he said. “The ‘origin’ is ‘Where did the organics come from that led to us?’ The ‘destiny’ is ‘Will we go the way of the dinosaurs?’ ”

October 3, 2011

Ralph M. Steinman, a Nobel Recipient for Research on Immunology, Dies at 68

By WILLIAM GRIMES

Dr. Ralph M. Steinman, a cell biologist who was named one of three winners of the Nobel Prize in Medicine on Monday for his work on the human immune response, died Friday in Manhattan, a fact unknown to the prize committee when it made its announcement. He was 68.

The cause was pancreatic cancer, his daughter Lesley said.

Dr. Steinman, the director of the Laboratory of Cellular Physiology and Immunology at Rockefeller University and a senior physician at the Rockefeller University Hospital, shared the award with Bruce A. Beutler, of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas and the Scripps Research Center in San Diego, and Jules A. Hoffmann, a former research director of the National Center for Scientific Research in Strasbourg, France. The three scientists were honored for discovering the essential steps in the immune system’s response to infection.

In 1973, Dr. Steinman and Dr. Zanvil A. Cohn discovered a new class of cells, known as dendritic cells, that play a critical role in activating the body’s adaptive immune system, and his subsequent research led to a new understanding of how they function.

“Ralph’s research has laid the foundation for numerous discoveries in the critically important field of immunology, and it has led to innovative new approaches in how we treat cancer, infectious diseases and disorders of the immune system,” said Marc Tessier-Lavigne, the president of Rockefeller University, in a statement published on the university’s Web site.

Dr. Steinman, who had been suffering from pancreatic cancer for four years, had been undergoing treatment using a pioneering immunotherapy based on his own research. Dendritic cells from his body were deployed to mount an assault on his cancer.

“He was very enthusiastic about the possibilities of immunotherapy,” Lesley Steinman said. “As soon as he was diagnosed, he said, ‘I’m going to get right on this with some things I’ve been working on.’ ”

Dr. Steinman’s research extended the insights made possible by Dr. Hoffmann’s discovery, in 1996, of cell receptors in fruit flies that are activated by pathogenic bacteria or fungi, and Dr. Beutler’s identification of cell receptors in mice, genetically similar to the receptors in fruit flies, that can cause septic shock when stimulated.

The receptors studied by Dr. Hoffmann and Dr. Beutler act as a first line of defense in the immune response by recognizing potentially harmful bacteria and other microorganisms. Dr. Steinman focused on the dendritic cells that play a critical role in adaptive immunity, activating T-cells that help the body mount a defense against infections that breach the first line of defense.

Dr. Steinman was awarded half the prize, which totals $1.45 million, and the other half was divided between the two other winners, but the award was called into question because the rules governing the Nobel Prize do not allow it to be awarded posthumously unless death occurs after the announcement is made.

Citing this exception, the prize committee announced Monday that the award would stand. “An interpretation of the purpose of this rule leads to the conclusion that Ralph Steinman shall be awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine,” it said.

Ralph Marvin Steinman was born on Jan. 14, 1943, in Montreal. He received a bachelor of science degree from McGill University in 1963 and a degree from Harvard Medical School in 1968.

After completing an internship and residency at Massachusetts General Hospital, he joined Rockefeller University in 1970 as a postdoctoral fellow in the Laboratory of Cellular Physiology and Immunology. Working with Dr. Cohn, he began researching the primary white cells of the immune system — the large macrophages and the highly specific lymphocytes — which operate in a variety of ways to spot, apprehend and destroy infectious microorganisms and tumor cells.

He later concentrated on the role of dendritic cells in the onset of several immune responses, including graft rejection, resistance to tumors, autoimmune diseases and infections, including AIDS. He and Dr. Cohn coined the term, whose Greek root, “dendron,” or “tree,” refers to the branched projections that the cells develop.

Dr. Steinman lived in Westport, Conn. In addition to his daughter Lesley, of Seattle, he is survived by his wife, the former Claudia Hoeffel; his mother, Nettie, of Montreal; a son, Adam, of Brooklyn; another daughter, Alexis, of Los Angeles; two brothers, Seymour, of Montreal, and Mark, of Toronto; a sister, Joni, of Toronto; and three grandchildren.

LYNN MARGULIS 1938-2011
"GAIA IS A TOUGH BITCH"

Biologist Lynn Margulis died on November 22nd. She stood out from her colleagues in that she would have extended evolutionary studies nearly four billion years back in time. Her major work was in cell evolution, in which the great event was the appearance of the eukaryotic, or nucleated, cell — the cell upon which all larger life-forms are based. Nearly forty-five years ago, she argued for its symbiotic origin: that it arose by associations of different kinds of bacteria. Her ideas were generally either ignored or ridiculed when she first proposed them; symbiosis in cell evolution is now considered one of the great scientific breakthroughs.

Margulis was also a champion of the Gaia hypothesis, an idea developed in the 1970s by the free lance British atmospheric chemist James E. Lovelock. The Gaia hypothesis states that the atmosphere and surface sediments of the planet Earth form a self- regulating physiological system — Earth's surface is alive. The strong version of the hypothesis, which has been widely criticized by the biological establishment, holds that the earth itself is a self-regulating organism; Margulis subscribed to a weaker version, seeing the planet as an integrated self- regulating ecosystem. She was criticized for succumbing to what George Williams called the "God-is good" syndrome, as evidenced by her adoption of metaphors of symbiosis in nature. She was, in turn, an outspoken critic of mainstream evolutionary biologists for what she saw as a failure to adequately consider the importance of chemistry and microbiology in evolution.

I first met her in 1995 when I interviewed her for my book The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution (1995). Below, in remembrance, please see her chapter, "Gaia is a Tough Bitch". One of the compelling features of The Third Culture was that I invited each of the participants to comment about the others. In this regard, the end of the following chapter has comments on Margulis and her work by Daniel C. Dennett, the late George C. Williams, W. Daniel Hillis, Lee Smolin, Marvin Minsky, Richard Dawkins, and the late Francisco Varela. Interesting stuff.

As I wrote in the introduction to the first part of the book (Part I: The Evolutionary Idea): "The principal debates are concerned with the mechanism of speciation; whether natural selection operates at the level of the gene, the organism, or the species, or all three; and also with the relative importance of other factors, such as natural catastrophes." These very public debates were concerned with ideas represented by George C. Williams and Richard Dawkins on one side and Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge on the other side. Not for Lynn Margulis. All the above scientists were wrong because evolutionary studies needed to begin four billion years back in time. And she was not shy about expressing her opinions. Her in-your-face, take-no-prisoners stance was pugnacious and tenacious. She was impossible. She was wonderful.

[ED NOTE: I am asking participants in "The Third Culture" as well as other interested Edgies for comments which we will post as they are received.]

LYNN MARGULIS was Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Geology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She was the author of Symbiotic Planet, The Origin of Eukaryotic Cells,Early Life, and Symbiosis in Cell Evolution. She was also the coauthor, with Karlene V. Schwartz, ofFive Kingdoms: An Illustrated Guide to the Phyla of Life on Earth and with Dorion Sagan of Acquiring Genomes, Microcosmos, Origins Of Sex, and Mystery Dance.

William H. Prusoff.

Image credit: Laura Prusoff.

doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001190.g001

Regarded as the father of antiviral chemotherapy, William H. Prusoff (Bill) passed away on April 3, 2011, in New Haven, Connecticut. Dr. Prusoff spent most of his career studying analogs of thymidine, a nucleoside building block of DNA, with an eye toward developing therapeutic agents. By exploring analogs to thymidine for use as antiviral drugs, his research created a new scientific paradigm for antiviral drug development.

In the late 1950s, Bill synthesized one of the first thymadine analogs, 5-iododeoxyuridine. At the time, it was thought to be difficult to find antiviral drugs with a high therapeutic index, but Professor Herbert E. Kaufman found that the compound could be used as an effective topical treatment for herpes virus keratitis by disrupting the virus's ability to reproduce. More significantly, though, this discovery was a scientific game changer—it was the first time that a clinical antiviral drug had been shown to have selective antiviral activity if used properly.

My association with Bill started in the early 1970s during my postdoctoral work at Yale. Together with Professor David Ward, we found that 5′amino-5-iododeoxyuridine had a high degree of selectivity against the herpes simplex virus in culture. Around the same time, Dr. James Black and Dr. Gertrude Elion at Burroughs Wellcome found that acyclovir, another nucleoside analog, also exhibited anti-herpes virus behavior in culture. Scientifically, these were major breakthroughs because these two discoveries were the first demonstrations of highly selective antiviral drug behavior due to the unique properties of the herpes simplex virus. Subsequently, it was found that the selectivity was due to the preferential activation of compounds by viral specified thymidine kinase. Due to an unexpected toxicity found in young mice, 5′amino-5-iododeoxyuridine was never further developed, but acyclovirin went on to become the first orally active anti-herpes virus drug.

In the 1980s, while the AIDS epidemic was spreading and found to be caused by HIV, Bill and the late Dr. Tai-Shun Lin discovered that a compound synthesized by Dr. Jerome Horwitz had potent anti-HIV properties. The compound was originally named D4T, and Bristol-Myers Squibb developed and marketed this drug under its more common name, Zerit. It became a key drug as part of the first combination therapy for treating AIDS. Realizing that this treatment could provide great benefits to those struggling with the growing HIV crisis in impoverished Africa, Doctors Without Borders and Yale students later lobbied Yale University and Bristol-Myers Squibb to make Zerit available at a low cost for the African market. Bill quickly joined the effort, even though it meant a loss of personal income. “We are not doing this to make money, we are interested in developing a compound that would be a benefit to society,” he explained. The effort to make Zerit more affordable was a success: millions of people around the world benefited from Bill's research and humanitarian efforts.

Bill was born on June 25, 1920, in New York City and attended the University of Miami. After receiving his undergraduate degree in chemistry, he obtained his PhD from Columbia University and later completed his postdoctoral training in the laboratory of Professor Arnold Welch at Case Western Reserve University. After Dr. Welch was recruited by Yale to head the Medical School's pharmacology department, Bill was invited to join the same department as an assistant professor and was subsequently promoted to the rank of professor. This relationship at Yale would span over the next 58 years, with Bill becoming one of Yale's most well respected scientists and teachers.

Though Bill officially retired at age 70, he never stopped working and continued to be industrious. Until his death, his work as professor emeritus concentrated on the potential for using boronated-thymidine analogs as sensitizing cancer agents for neutron therapy.

Bill's remarkable contributions did not go unnoticed in his lifetime. Among his many accolades, he received the ASPET Award from the American Society of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics and the Peter Parker Medal, Yale School of Medicine's highest award. He also received the Inaugural Lifetime Achievement Award from the Yale Comprehensive Cancer Center. His legacy was further solidified when the School of Medicine established an endowed chair in his name and the Department of Pharmacology named one of its conference rooms after him. In addition, the International Society for Virus Research established the William Prusoff Young Investigator Lecture Award.

Despite his numerous awards and prestigious accomplishments, Bill was an extremely humble and down-to-earth man who was quick to understate his achievements and even quicker to share the credit with others. He lived modestly, unselfishly, and with the highest integrity. These traits made him an extremely popular and highly respected individual everywhere. I do not remember a time that anyone would say anything bad about him. He was always eager to assist others. As a fellow at Pierson College here at Yale, he would provide students with help but never boasted or took credit. Bill also generously contributed to charities, endowing several lectureships in pharmacology, virology, and public health at Yale, supporting research in several laboratories, and establishing the William H. Prusoff Foundation to support various programs, including the United Way and the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Anti-Semitism. He dedicated his life to the service of others because he saw generosity and helping as a natural extension of the human condition. He was a role model for scholars to follow.

Bill was always upbeat, smiling and ready with a joke. His lifelong optimism in the worst of times was always inspiring—he often said “the best is yet to come.” Even in the hospital under intense discomfort, he kept a lighthearted and positive disposition, making light of his situation when we knew how serious it was. He even kept on sending us jokes through email when he couldn't tell them in person.

For those of us fortunate enough to have personally known him, we were gifted with his peculiar sense of humor, warm welcoming company, and deep wisdom. Bill's influence was much broader, though: training a new generation of scientists who have gone on to become successful in their own right, rippling with their own contributions that have affected others. For the millions of lives his work has touched and saved, we have lost a giant scientist in this age.

December 11, 2011

Joseph Chamberlain, 88, Dies; Brought the Stars a Bit Closer

By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Joseph M. Chamberlain, who helped advance astronomical education and entertainment by leading planetariums in New York and Chicago into a new era of technology, instruction and visitor experience, died on Nov. 28 in Peoria, Ill., where he lived. He was 88.

His death was announced by the Adler Planetarium in Chicago.

Dr. Chamberlain’s love was sailing, and he taught celestial navigation courses during his 16 years at the Hayden Planetarium in Manhattan, 12 of which he spent as its leader, and during his 23 years as director and president at the Adler. His larger impact at both places was to build new facilities, buy new projectors to make tiny stars brighter and comets more dashing, hire more professional astronomers, strengthen and increase the number of special exhibitions and greatly expand educational offerings.

In an interview with The New York Daily Mirror in 1954, Dr. Chamberlain said a theatrical touch was essential. “Give the audience 40 minutes of astronomy and there would be no audience,” he said. “It has to be a combination of science and showmanship. If there’s a sunrise, we furnish appropriate sunrise music.”

Dr. Chamberlain was one of the first scientists to organize cruises to distant destinations for planetariums and other groups so people could witness heavenly events like eclipses and comets.

Joseph Miles Chamberlain was born in Peoria on July 26, 1923, and remained there after graduating from high school to enroll at Bradley University. But he left the college during World War II to become a cadet at the United States Merchant Marine Academy in Kings Point, N.Y., where he earned a bachelor’s degree. He then served on transport ships in the Atlantic and the Pacific before returning to Bradley to finish a second bachelor’s degree. To finance his education, he taught high school part time and worked in a cigar store.

Returning to New York, he taught nautical science at the Merchant Marine Academy and earned master’s and doctorate degrees from Teacher’s College of Columbia University, concentrating on meteorology and astronomy. He gave guest lectures at the Hayden Planetarium, averaging five a week from 1950 to 1952.

The Hayden hired him as an assistant curator in 1952. He then rose through the ranks to become Hayden’s chairman in 1956 and an assistant director of the American Museum of Natural History, Hayden’s parent, in 1964.

A high point of Dr. Chamberlain’s tenure came in 1960, when he bought a powerful new projector for the planetarium’s famous star show. It replaced one that was wearing out, and it was equipped to display more arcane celestial phenomena.

Dr. Chamberlain was frequently quoted in the New York press on matters like eclipses, the change of seasons and the visibility of particular planets. He would personally answer letters from children, including ones asking him to “please write up the solar system for me.” He told them to do their own homework.

As assistant director of the natural history museum in 1965, Dr. Chamberlain was sent to Florida to retrieve the 100-carat DeLong star ruby, which had turned up after being stolen from the museum. He carried it under his shirt. A private investigator who traveled with him carried a black attaché case handcuffed to his wrist as a decoy.

Dr. Chamberlain arrived in Chicago when oversight of the Adler was shifting from the city to a private board. He replaced fraying technology, charged admission for the first time, installed a telescope through which the public could directly view the heavens, and came up with attractions like the Stairway to the Stars, an escalator lined with thousands of flickering stars that linked two theaters. He got the Adler accredited as a museum.

He also occasionally invited people into the planetarium’s main dome to listen to him recite poetry from memory.

Dr. Chamberlain, who was chairman of the International Planetarium Directors Conference for 12 years, retired in 1991.

He is survived by his wife of 65 years, the former Paula Jane Bruninga; three daughters, Janet Flinchbaugh, Susan Cardwell and Barbara Vetterick; a brother, Thad; a sister, Barbara Abegg; and four grandchildren.

By the way, Dr. Chamberlain discovered life on Mars in 1958, according to a report in The New York Times. The breakthrough came as his employees were making a large globe representing Mars from plants for a flower show. He spotted a spider crawling over the planet’s surface. “Good heaven, there is life on Mars!” Dr. Chamberlain exclaimed.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 13, 2011

An obituary on Monday about Joseph M. Chamberlain, who ran the Hayden Planetariums in New York and the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, misstated the year in which he gave an interview to The New York Daily Mirror. It was 1954, not 1964.

December 25, 2011

Robert Ader, Who Linked Stress and Illness, Dies at 79

By PAUL VITELLO

Dr. Robert Ader, an experimental psychologist who was among the first scientists to show how mental processes influence the body’s immune system, a finding that changed modern medicine, died on Tuesday in Pittsford, N.Y. He was 79.

His death followed a long illness and complications of a fracture suffered in a fall, his daughter Deborah Ader said.

Dr. Ader, who spent his entire career as a professor of psychiatry and psychology at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry, conducted some of the original experiments in a field he named himself, psychoneuroimmunology.

His initial research, in the 1970s, became a touchstone for studies that have since mapped the vast communications network among immune cells, hormones and neurotransmitters. It introduced a field of research that nailed down the science behind notions once considered magical thinking: that meditation helps reduce arterial plaque; that social bonds improve cancer survival; that people under stress catch more colds; and that placebos work not only on the human mind but also on supposedly insentient cells.

At the core of Dr. Ader’s breakthrough research was an insight already obvious to any grandmother who ever said, “Stop worrying or you’ll make yourself sick.” He demonstrated scientifically that stress worsens illness — sometimes even triggering it — and that reducing stress is essential to health care.

That idea, now widely accepted among medical researchers, contradicted a previous principle of biochemistry, which said that the immune system was autonomous. As late as 1985, the idea of a connection between the brain and the immune system was dismissed in an editorial in The New England Journal of Medicine as “folklore.”

“Today there is not a physician in the country who does not accept the science Bob Ader set in motion,” said Dr. Bruce Rabin, founder of the Brain, Behavior and Immunity Center at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, who considered Dr. Ader a mentor. “He attracted interest in the field and made it possible to prove that ‘mind-body’ is real.”

Dr. Ader said his breakthrough began in 1975 with what he called “scientific serendipity.”

He and a fellow researcher, Dr. Nicholas Cohen, were conducting an unrelated experiment about taste aversion involving rats and saccharine-sweetened water when they stumbled on a mysterious phenomenon.

In the experiment, one group of rats was given sweetened water accompanied by an injection that caused stomach aches. (A control group got only the sweetened water.) When the injections stopped, and the rats that had experienced stomach aches refused to drink the water, researchers force-fed them with eye-droppers in order to complete the experiment’s protocols.

Dr. Ader and Dr. Cohen had expected the conditioned rats to refuse the drink. They had not anticipated that forcing them to drink would eventually kill them, however, which it did, some time afterward.

The two reviewed their protocols and guessed that the drugs used in the injections might have had some bearing on the deaths. They could have used any drug that caused stomach pain without doing serious harm. But the researchers discovered that they had unwittingly picked Cytoxan, which besides causing stomach aches suppresses the immune system. At first they suspected that the rats had died from an overdose of Cytoxan. Then they determined that the dosage the rats received had been too low to support that explanation.

So they developed a theory, which became a landmark of medical science as further experiments proved it correct: The rats died because the mere taste of saccharine-laced water was enough to trigger neurological signals that did indeed suppress their immune systems — exactly as if they had been overdosed with Cytoxan. The rats succumbed to bacterial and viral infections they were unable to fight off. It was an example of the so-called placebo effect, only in this case it did not fool the brain into thinking it had been given something beneficial but rather the opposite.

The findings were “incontrovertible,” Anne Harrington, a Harvard professor of the history of science, wrote in the 1997 book “The Placebo Effect.”

“The fact that he had achieved this in rats rather than humans was a further blockbuster,” she continued, “because it undermined the frequent assumption that placebo effects were a product of peculiarly human interpersonal processes.”

Robert Ader was born on Feb. 20, 1932, in the Bronx, the older of two sons of Mae and Nathan Ader. His father, who owned a liquor wholesale company, died in a car accident in 1945 when Robert was a teenager. After graduating from the private Horace Mann School in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, he received his bachelor’s degree from Tulane University and, in 1957, his Ph.D. in psychology from Cornell.

Soon after, he became an assistant professor in the department of psychology at the University of Rochester, where he went on to hold many teaching and research posts. He retired in July as a professor emeritus of psychosocial medicine.

Besides his daughter Deborah, he is survived by his wife, Gayle; three other daughters, Janet, Rini and Leslie Ader; and a grandson.

Since he inaugurated the study of psychoneuroimmunology (usually referred to as PNI), Dr. Ader had to defend its premise against doubters in the medical establishment and later to disassociate it from New Age therapies that he called “flaky” because they had not been grounded in solid scientific experimentation.

Deborah Ader, a psychology researcher, said a sense of modesty had been at the core of her father’s curiosity as a scientist.

“My father used to say, ‘I just didn’t know any better,’ ” she said, recounting how he had described his pioneering research.

He told her, she recalled, “I didn’t know the immune system wasn’t supposed to be connected to the brain.”

Jacob Goldman, Xerox computer pioneer, dies

Dennis McLellan, Los Angeles Times

Wednesday, December 28, 2011

Jacob E. Goldman, the former Xerox chief scientist who created the company's famed Palo Alto Research Center, whose scientists and engineers invented the modern personal computer in the 1970s and developed an array of other pioneering computing technologies, has died. He was 90.

Mr. Goldman, a resident of Westport, Conn., died Tuesday at a hospital in nearby Stamford after a short illness, said his son, Melvin.

A physicist, Mr. Goldman had been the head of the research and development laboratory at Ford Motor Co. before joining Xerox, then based in Rochester, N.Y., as chief scientist in late 1967.

At the time, Xerox was the dominant manufacturer of office copiers. But as chief scientist responsible for overseeing all of the company's research, Goldman quickly focused his attention on new technologies.

"There was this whole concept of the paperless office that was sort of in the air at the time," said Michael Hiltzik, a Los Angeles Times business columnist and author of the 1999 book "Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC in the Dawn of the Computer Age."

"Since Xerox earned a commission from every piece of paper that went through its leased copiers, Goldman understood that technologies that did not rely on paper posed a threat to the bottom line," Hiltzik said.

Proposing that Xerox "establish scientific pre-eminence" in fast-developing computer technology, Mr. Goldman persuaded the company to create a corporate lab that would focus on the future.

Using AT&T's Bell Laboratories as a model, he sketched out a corporate research center that would engage in basic science independent of any Xerox product line.

Mr. Goldman recruited physicist George Pake to become the laboratory's first director, and the Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC, opened near Stanford University in 1970.

Xerox PARC researchers went on to invent the modern personal computer, the laser printer, Windows-style computing displays and the Ethernet, and they played an important role in the development of the Internet, Hiltzik said.

"At PARC, they thought of Jack Goldman as basically their father, the guy at headquarters who was on their side," he said.

"PARC would not exist if not for Jack Goldman, and it certainly would not have had the independence that it had, and it probably would not have achieved a fraction of what it achieved if not for his vision and his determination to protect it."

Bob Taylor, who founded the computer science lab at PARC in 1970, said Mr. Goldman was "the first at Xerox to recognize the importance of computing technology to the office."

"Many people at Xerox during Goldman's time there did not share his enthusiasm, and consequently Xerox failed to take advantage of many of the enormous breakthroughs that happened there," Taylor said.

Mr. Goldman "pushed for Xerox to develop these inventions, but Xerox only developed laser printing. Other companies developed the other technologies. Those other companies include Apple, Microsoft, Cisco, 3Com, Adobe, Sun Microsystems and several others," Taylor said.

"The technologies upon which these companies were based all came from the computer science lab of Xerox PARC."

The son of Eastern European immigrants, Mr. Goldman was born in Brooklyn on July 18, 1921. He earned a bachelor's degree at Yeshiva University in New York City and his master's degree and doctorate in physics at the University of Pennsylvania.

In addition to his son Melvin, Mr. Goldman is survived by his wife, Rhoda; two daughters, Beth and Edith; three stepsons, Ari, Dov and Shalom; a sister, Judy Crystal; eight grandchildren; and eight great-grandchildren.

Evolutionary Pioneer Dies at 73

Lynn Margulis, an innovative thinker who proposed symbiosis as a major mechanism for speciation, passed away last week.

By Edyta Zielinska | November 28, 2011

Lynn Margulis 

Evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis died last week (November 22) at the age of 73.  She was best known for proposing the theory of endosymbiosis, which states that rather than evolving via genetic mutation, new species were more likely to have come about via parasitic or symbiotic relationships that became permanently inter-dependent over time.

“She was always stimulating; she always had a new idea, some new connection she had seen and she couldn’t wait to tell you about,” Steve Goodwin, Dean of the College of Natural Resources
 and the Environment told MassLive.com.

Margulis showed early aptitude in science, enrolling at the University of Chicago and earning her bachelor’s degree in zoology by the age of 18. Shortly thereafter she married her first husband, the astronomer Carl Sagan.  The marriage ended by the time she got her doctorate in genetics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1965.

She developed her ideas on symbiosis in the late 1960s, and tried to publish her ideas in 15 journals before finally being accepted by the Journal of Theoretical Biology, according to The New York Times.  Though it was highly controversial at the time, serial symbiosis is widely accepted among evolutionary scientists today.

In the 1970s, she became a supporter of James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, which proposed that the earth could be thought of as a complex system whose atmospheric and mineral components existed in symbiosis with living organisms, allowing biota as a whole to self-perpetuate.

She taught evolutionary biology for nearly 40 years, first at the Boston University and then at the University of Massachusetts, where I had the opportunity to experience her carefully crafted course. I came to the class expecting Margulis to expound on the theories that she had championed. Instead, she exposed our small seminar class to the experiments of many researchers whose work provided evidence for her ideas, and invited us to make own conclusions.

“If science doesn’t fit in with the cultural milieu, people dismiss science—they never reject their cultural milieu!” said Margulis in the book The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution. In the same chapter, Richard Dawkins wrote: “I greatly admire Lynn Margulis’s sheer courage and stamina in sticking by the endosymbiosis theory, and carrying it through from being an unorthodoxy to an orthodoxy.”

According to The New York Times, Margulis died from a stroke.  She is survived by a daughter Jennifer Margulis and three sons Dorion Sagan, Jeremy Sagan, Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma.