June 15, 1915 - August 23, 2008
The virologist and parasitologist Thomas Weller was awarded the 1954 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine jointly with his Harvard colleagues John Enders and Frederick Robbins for developing methods for growing the polio virus in the laboratory. …
Michael DeBakey, the Texas cardiovascular surgeon who developed heart-bypass procedures that improved the lives of millions of patients and prolonged life for others, died yesterday in Houston of natural causes. …
June 1, 1923 - May 8, 2008
The invention of the nicotine patch was partly the work of Murray Jarvik, who first become known in medical circles for his studies in psychopharmacology — in particular, the effect of LSD on memory and addiction. Always pragmatic, he was, in the Eighties, to follow up what was literally field research to create the patch. …
November 5, 1915 - May 5, 2008
Physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project and invented the neoprene wetsuit
Neither time nor tide has eroded the debate around who invented the wetsuit — since the mid-1950s, when the neoprene outfits became common among divers, argument has raged over who was the originator. However, Hugh Bradner, a physicist who worked on atomic bomb testing in the Pacific, has the strongest claim to the title. …
A plastic surgeon to the stars has been found dead in the doorway of his London home.
It’s believed Martin Kelly — dubbed the “king of rhinoplasty” by his celebrity clients — suffered a heart attack.
Mr Kelly, who was married to Californication actress Natascha McElhone who is pregnant with the couple’s third child, was found by a friend at his West London home. …
Edward Lorenz, the father of chaos theory, died at his home in Cambridge, Mass., Wednesday. He was 90.
He was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology when he came up with the scientific concept that small effects lead to big changes, something that was explained in a simple example known as the “butterfly effect.” He explained how something as minuscule as a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil changes the constantly moving atmosphere in ways that could later trigger tornadoes in Texas.
His discovery of “deterministic chaos” brought about “one of the most dramatic changes in mankind’s view of nature since Sir Isaac Newton,” said the committee that awarded Lorenz the 1991 Kyoto Prize for basic sciences. … Read full obituary
John Wheeler, the scientist who gave the phenomenon of ‘black holes’ its name, has died at the age of 96.
The eminent physician died of pneumonia at his home in New Jersey on Sunday April 13th.
During his career Professor Wheeler made numerous scientific contributions to many of the research advances of the 20th century.
He worked with scientists including Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr and was instrumental in the development of both the atomic and hydrogen bombs. … Read full obituary
Kenneth L. Franklin, long the Hayden Planetarium’s top astronomer, whose accomplishments included helping pinpoint the first noise known to have come from another planet and inventing a watch for use on the moon, died in Boulder, Colo., on Monday when the sun rose in New York at 5:07 a.m. He was 84, and had for years provided astronomical information to this newspaper, including the hour of sunrise. … Read full obituary
Charles Lee Remington, the intellectual patriarch of modern American lepidopterology, the scientific study of butterflies and moths, died on May 31 in Hamden, Conn. He was 85. … Read full obituary
Stanley L. Miller, a scientist whose spectacular discovery as a young graduate student pioneered the study of the origin of life on earth, died Sunday at a hospital near his home in National City, Calif. He was 77. … Read full obituary
Dr. David B. Ast, a dentist and public health official who led an effort to begin fluoridating the water supply in New York State in the 1940s and helped prove its safety and effectiveness in preventing tooth decay, died on Feb. 3 in Laguna Hills, Calif. He was 104. …
Jane Hodgson, a prominent abortion rights advocate who in a highly publicized test case in 1970 became the only doctor in the United States to be convicted of illegally performing an abortion in a hospital, died on Oct. 23 at her home in Rochester, Minn. She was 91. … Read full obituary
Dr. James Van Allen, the Iowa-born space pioneer, died today at the age of 91. …
His use of instruments carried aboard the first successful U.S. satellite, Explorer 1, in 1958 to discover bands of intense radiation surrounding the Earth — later known as Van Allen radiation belts — was a groundbreaking achievement. … Read full obituary
GENEVA, Switzerland (AP) — Dr. Lee Jong-wook, who spearheaded the World Health Organization’s successive battles against SARS and bird flu, died Monday after undergoing emergency surgery for a blood clot in his brain, officials said. He was 61. … Read full obituary
First surgeon in the U.S. to perform a successful heart transplant.
On July 24, 1965, the British journal Nature published an article that revolutionized the way we all understand the Earth.
The paper was written by the Canadian scientist John Tuzo Wilson, a man gifted with stunning vitality and extraordinary intuition. … Read full obituary
Dr. Robert Atkins, creator of the high-protein, low-carbohydrate Atkins Diet, died Thursday after an accidental fall on April 8 left him comatose. … Read full obituary
John E. Fryer, a psychiatrist who electrified his colleagues by telling the 1972 convention of the American Psychiatric Association in a mask that he was a homosexual at a time homosexuality was classified as a mental illness, died on Feb. 21 in Philadelphia. He was 65. … Read full obituary
Kalpana Chawla, who is feared to have perished in the Columbia space shuttle mishap along with six others, had done India proud when she embarked on her first space mission on November 19, 1997. … Read full obituary
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — NASA declared an emergency after losing communication with space shuttle Columbia as the ship soared over Texas several minutes before its expected landing time Saturday morning. … Read full story
January 17, 2003 — Robert J. Braidwood, a University of Chicago archaeologist who uncovered evidence of the beginnings of agriculture and the subsequent rise of civilization in the Middle East, died on Wednesday in Chicago. He was 95. … Read full obituary
Alan P. Bell, a Kinsey Institute researcher who helped conduct a pioneering large-scale study that countered the notion that homosexuals were maladjusted, died on May 13 in Bloomington, Ind., where he lived. He was 70.
The cause was a stroke, his wife, Shirley, said.
In 1968, Dr. Bell and a colleague, Martin S. Weinberg, began surveying nearly 1,000 gays in San Francisco to assess their mental health and to try to determine what, if anything, in their lives had influenced their sexual orientation.
“It was the most ambitious study of male homosexuality ever attempted,” said Martin B. Duberman, a history professor at the City University of New York who has written on gay issues. The resulting books, “Homosexualities” (1978) and “Sexual Preference” (1981), “refuted a large number of previous studies that gay men were social misfits,” Professor Duberman said.
The study found that homosexuals were as well adjusted and as satisfied in their relationships as heterosexuals. … Read full obituary
Stephen Jay Gould, the paleontologist and author who eloquently demystified science for the public and challenged his colleagues with revolutionary ideas about evolution, died Monday of cancer.
He was 60, and died at his home in New York City, according to his assistant, Stephanie Schur. …
Gould became one of America’s most recognizable scientists for his voluminous and accessible writings and his participation in public debates with creationists. He also aired his disagreements with other evolutionary theorists in publications such as the New York Review of Books, bringing evolutionary theory to a wider intellectual audience during an era of increasing scientific specialization.
“He really was paleontology’s public intellectual,” said Andrew Knoll, a colleague of Gould’s at Harvard University for 20 years. … Read full obituary
The renowned Norwegian explorer and archaeologist Thor Heyerdahl has died of cancer at the age of 87.
He passed away in his family home at Colla Micheri, northern Italy, after a long illness.
Heyerdahl had undergone surgery last year, but it failed to halt his disease. He was admitted to hospital in March when the cancer spread to his brain.
Heyerdahl will be forever remembered as the Kon-Tiki man. In 1947 he skippered the tiny balsawood raft on a 6,000 kilometre journey from Peru to Polynesia.
It proved, he said, that ancient cultures could have sailed to, and populated, the South Pacific. … Read full obituary
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