Dead Celebrity Alert

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. …

This pioneering research enabled others to develop the polio vaccine that has resulted in the near-eradication of the disease from the world. The work found immediate applications to vitally important medical problems and opened up new fields of virus research, making it possible to grow a large number of other viruses in the laboratory and to create many other vaccines.

Weller also isolated the rubella (German measles) virus and the varicella-zoster virus (the common cause of chicken-pox in children and shingles in adults) and showed that the rubella virus and herpes virus could be transmitted from mother to foetus, producing birth defects. … Read full obituary

July 12 (Bloomberg) — 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.

He died at age 99, two years and five months after himself becoming among the world’s oldest survivor of an operation he had devised, Baylor College of Medicine and The Methodist Hospital confirmed in a statement.

During seven decades, DeBakey’s advances helped prevent heart attacks and strokes as he developed surgical methods that later became widespread. He also designed dozens of medical devices, such as the heart pump, and trained thousands of surgeons, mostly at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, which posted a memorial of DeBakey on the home page of its Web site. … Read full obituary

June 1, 1923 - May 8, 2008

Inventor of the nicotine patch who first become known in medical circles for his studies in psychopharmacology

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. … Read full obituary

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.

Hugh Bradner was born in 1915, in Tonopah, Nevada. His father, Donal Byal Bradner, was briefly director of the Chemical Warfare Service at Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland and in 1918 taught his son to swim by throwing him into the Gunpowder River. Bradner graduated from Miami University in 1936 and received a PhD in physics from the California Institute of Technology in 1941. … Read full obituary

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. …

It’s been widely reported that Mr Kelly — part of private practice London Plastic Surgery Associates — was responsible for reconstructing socialite Tara Palmer-Tomkinson’s nose, who once had a problem with cocaine abuse. … Read full story

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. …

When people celebrated, cowered or yawned at the dawn of a new millennium on Jan. 1, 2000, Dr. Franklin wrote a paper strongly explaining that the new millennium would not properly begin until a year later.

He ended with a point that seems indisputable: “Whenever you note the time on the clock, realize that it is now — right now — later than it has ever been.” … 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. …

Dr. Remington, a professor at Yale University for more than four decades, co-founded the field’s scientific organization, the Lepidopterists’ Society, while still a graduate student. Later, as a professor, he shaped the field by recruiting and serving as a mentor to several generations of the discipline’s leading scientists. Dr. Remington also helped the discipline grow outside the walls of the academy, working with serious amateur collectors, most famously with Vladimir Nabokov.

“When you wanted to know anything about butterflies, you went to him,” said Naomi Pierce, Hessel professor of biology at Harvard University and former student of Dr. Remington’s. … 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.

The cause was heart failure, said his brother, Donald Miller.

Dr. Miller was known for a classic experiment that he performed as a graduate student and published in 1953. The experiment showed how amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, could easily be generated from the simple chemicals assumed to have been present on the primitive earth.

The finding caught the imagination of scientists everywhere by suggesting that it might soon be possible to reconstruct the emergence of the first living cells from the soup of chemicals generated by natural conditions on the early earth. Dr. Miller had opened an experimental approach toward one of the hardest remaining problems in biology. … 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.

The cause was heart failure, his family said.

In 1944, Dr. Ast began a 10-year study of fluoridation that became evidence of the benefits of treating public water and made a strong case for wider use. He selected two towns of comparable size along the Hudson River, Newburgh and Kingston, and compared the health and dental records of their residents. …

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. …

Until January 1973, when the Supreme Court handed down its landmark decision in Roe v. Wade, abortion was illegal in most states. Among them was Minnesota, where Dr. Hodgson had a busy practice as an obstetrician and gynecologist.

In April 1970, Dr. Hodgson agreed to perform an abortion in order to challenge Minnesota law. At the time, abortion was permitted in the state only to save the woman’s life. …

In later years, Dr. Hodgson remained a public champion of abortion rights, speaking widely on the subject and founding several reproductive health care clinics. She also lent her name to several abortion-related lawsuits, notably Hodgson v. Minnesota, which challenged a state law requiring both parents to be notified before a minor could have an abortion. … Read full obituary

Dr. James Van Allen, the Iowa-born space pioneer, died today at the age of 91.

Van Allen, a University of Iowa professor, was renowned in the scientific and academic communities. 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.

Van Allen, who was born in Mount Pleasant in 1914, became a professor and head of the University of Iowa Department of Physics and Astronomy in 1951. He won numerous awards and was given the National Medal of Science, the nation’s highest honor for scientific achievement, in 1987 by President Reagan. He retired from active teaching in 1985 but remained active monitoring data from the Pioneer 10 spacecraft, according to an article posted on the university Web site. … 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. …

Lee, who took over as director-general of WHO in 2003 as the agency battled the SARS outbreak in Asia, worked for WHO for 23 years, including time served in regional posts. He was the first South Korean to head a U.N. agency, after winning praise for his low-key but efficient management style as head of the agency’s tuberculosis program.

TIME magazine named Lee one of the world’s 100 most influential people in 2004. … Read full obituary

SAN FRANCISCO — Dr. Norman Shumway, the first surgeon to perform a successful heart transplant operation in the United States, died Friday of lung cancer, a Stanford University spokeswoman said. He was 83.

Shumway died at his home in Palo Alto, spokeswoman Ruthann Richter said. …

Shumway completed the first successful U.S. adult heart transplant in 1968, but he may be best known for continuing with transplant research as many others quit. … Read full obituary