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NPR memorial broadcast

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.

Scientific American called Wilson’s explanation of the new theory of plate tectonics as “one of the century’s five major advances in science.”

Wilson was born in Ottawa, the son of a Scottish engineer father and an adventurous, mountain-climbing mother. … 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.

Atkins, 72, was rushed to New York Weill Cornell Medical Center by his colleague, Dr. Keith Berkowitz, where surgeons removed a blood clot to relieve pressure in his brain on April 9.

Atkins slipped on an icy sidewalk outside his New York office. …

Atkins’ original 1972 book, “Dr. Atkins’ Diet Revolution,” was contrary to the recommendations of most nutritional experts at the time. While many remain skeptical about the Atkins Diet, it has become increasingly popular since the 1992 publication of his book, “Dr. Atkins’ New Diet Revolution.” …

He is credited with revolutionizing the diet world with his theory that you can lose weight by eating fat, and his followers hailed him as a pioneer. His critics accused him of selling a dangerous idea, but Atkins dismissed their claims. … 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.

The cause was aspiration pneumonia, which he suffered after a degenerative lung disease, his sister Katherine F. Helmbock, said.

No gay American psychiatrist had risked speaking publicly before Dr. Fryer’s appearance. When Dr. Fryer, wearing a baggy suit, a rubbery mask and a huge wig and using a microphone that distorted his voice, spoke at the association’s meeting in Dallas, it was a dramatic moment in the gay rights movement, and it helped change psychiatrists’ attitude toward homosexuality. …

In December 1973, after more protests and debate, the board of the psychiatric association voted to remove homosexuality from its list of mental disorders and to urge that “homosexuals be given all protections now guaranteed other citizens.” The members ratified the decision in April 1974. … 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.

The Karnal-born Chawla, the first Indian American astronaut, began her career at the Ames Research Center at Nasa in 1988. …

Born in Karnal in Punjab, Chawla did her schooling from the Tagore School in the city and took a degree in aeronautical engineering from the Punjab Engineering College.

She went on to complete her Masters from the University of Texas in 1984 earned a doctorate from the University of Colorado. … Read full obituary

Related:
Space Shuttle Columbia breaks up over Texas

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.

The shuttle was carrying the first Israeli astronaut and six Americans, and authorities had feared it would be a terrorist target.

Fifteen minutes after the expected landing time, and with no word from the shuttle, NASA announced that search and rescue teams were being mobilized in Dallas and Fort Worth areas. …

Columbia was at an altitude of 200,700 feet over north-central Texas at a 9 a.m., traveling at 12,500 mph when mission control lost contact and tracking data. … 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.

From close to the beginning of his career, Dr. Braidwood worked in partnership with his wife, Linda S. Braidwood, also an archaeologist. She died several hours later on Wednesday in the same hospital. She was 93. The couple lived in LaPorte, Ind. … 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

Bigfoot has lost its most credible and powerful advocate.

Grover Krantz, a professor of anthropology at Washington State University and a widely recognized expert on human evolution, died four days ago of pancreatic cancer at his home in Sequim. He was 70.

While few outside the field of anthropology may know of his significant scientific accomplishments in evolutionary theory, many know of his work on Bigfoot or Sasquatch — the hairy, humanoid, extra-large ape-like creature that some contend exists in the shadowy forests of the Pacific Northwest.

“Within the established academic community, Grover was the first one to stick his neck out,” said Loren Coleman, a cryptozoologist (one who studies creatures not yet officially identified) at the University of Southern Maine in Portland. …Read full obituary

Famed African archaeologist J. Desmond Clark of UC Berkeley has died at the age of 85

15 February 2002

By Robert Sanders, Media Relations

Berkeley - John Desmond Clark, the dean of African archaeology and a professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, died Thursday, Feb. 14, from pneumonia at a convalescent hospital in Oakland, Calif.

Clark, 85, had been in generally good health and had just returned to his home in Oakland after a trip to England.

“Clark was legendary,” said paleontologist Tim White, UC Berkeley professor of integrative biology and a longtime colleague. “He towered above anybody else in African archaeology with his breadth and depth of knowledge about the rise and development of prehistoric culture. His death leaves an enormous void.”

“He’s a monument to the field of archaeology,” said Clark Howell, UC Berkeley professor emeritus of anthropology, who first met Clark in 1954. “There is hardly anywhere that he didn’t touch with his archaeological capability and interest.”

Howell called him a “world-experienced prehistorian. He left behind a new set of scientific footsteps.”

Clark specialized in the study of stone tools, and brought archaeology to many sites in Africa, as well as in India and China. More than any other scholar of his generation, he developed African archaeology from the examination of ancient artifacts into the study of how our ancestors lived and thought.

He conducted much of his field work during the 24 years he served as director of the National Museum in Zambia, and continued work in Africa after coming to UC Berkeley in 1961.

“His lifelong quest was to elucidate the very beginnings of human culture and technology and its development through time in Africa, and he was not only an expert in the oldest stone tools, but he knew the Iron Age and the Late Stone Age and which colleague was digging at what cave, and where it was and how old it was. The knowledge and understanding this one man had of African archaeology will never be surpassed,” White said.

Though he retired in 1986, Clark continued to work until his death. He was co-leader for 20 years with White and Ethiopian archaeologists of a major research project at prehistoric sites in the Middle Awash Valley in the Horn of Africa. These sites have produced major hominid finds from as long ago as 6 million years.

“The combined record that’s come out of the Middle Awash, and will continue to come out of the Middle Awash, is - in the fossil realm - his greatest contribution, because he really started that work,” White said. ” While I and our Ethiopian colleagues dug up the hominids and other fossils, Desmond excavated the stone tools.”

One of the team’s most important contributions was the 1996 discovery of the worlds earliest large mammal butchery in Ethiopia, published in 1999 in the journal Science.

Just last year, Clark published his third major monograph on a prehistoric site in Zambia known as Kalambo Falls, and he was working on a major monograph on another African site. His extensive collections of fossils and tools remains a major part of the teaching and research collections in UC Berkeley’s Laboratory for Human Evolutionary Studies.

Clark was born in London on April 10, 1916, and attended Christ’s College at Cambridge University, where he first became interested in archaeology. With a B.A. in hand but few professional jobs available in the field, he accepted an offer to become secretary of the newly-formed Rhodes-Livingstone Institute in Northern Rhodesia, and the post of curator of the David Livingstone Memorial Museum. Arriving in what is now Zambia in 1938, he ended up staying 24 years.

At the time, there were only a handful of archaeologists on the entire African continent, but Clark began interacting with all of them, eventually getting involved in organizing the yearly Pan-African Congress on Prehistory. He explored numerous sites around the continent, including the Congo Basin, the Central African Rift Valley, the Sahara, the Nile Valley, Angola, Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa, and wrote extensively on new finds. He returned briefly to Cambridge to obtain an MA in 1940, a PhD in 1950 and an ScD in 1974.

Since he and his wife Betty first met at Cambridge, she has been his constant companion, accompanying him on digs, organizing the camps and seeing after the people, said longtime friend Elizabeth Colson, professor emeritus of anthropology at UC Berkeley. Betty Clark provided most of the drawings of stone implements for his papers, translated for him, served as secretary of the museum in Livingstone and, when her husband was away during World War II, ran the place.

Upon leaving his directorship of the museum, Desmond Clark was named a Companion of the Order of the British Empire.

At UC Berkeley, he worked with several colleagues to build a research and graduate student training program that became the country’s foremost center for the study of human origins and African archaeology.

In 1991, he lead a team that convinced China to open its doors to foreign archaeologists for the first time in 40 years, and obtained the first permit to dig for fossils in the Nihewan Basin near Beijing.

“One of his most important contributions was his very early recognition that we have to involve Africans in their own archaeology,” White said. “Beginning in the 1960s, he trained people from many African countries who now are museum directors and scientists who carry on this work.”

He published over 18 books on archaeology and paleoanthropology in Africa and other countries, as well as over 300 papers in journals and collected works. Many of these seminal works brought specific new information to the field and at the same time provided an overview of the current state of knowledge of a particular region.

Perhaps his best known works were The Prehistory of Africa (1970) and The Atlas of African Prehistory, reference collections still used in classes today.

“He literally wrote the book on African prehistory,” White said.

Clark became a foreign associate of the National Academy of Sciences in 1986 and a full member in 1993, when he became an American citizen. He also was a fellow of the British Academy, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Society of South Africa, and a member or fellow of more than 15 other learned societies.

Among his many awards was the Huxley Medal by the Royal Anthropological Institute, the L.S.B. Leakey Foundation’s 1996 Prize for Multidisciplinary Research on Ape and Human Evolution, and honorary degrees from the University of Witwatersrand and the University of Cape Town.

Clark was a longtime member of the scientific executive committee of the Leakey Foundation and had a commitment to that institution that spanned a number of decades.

“Even though his eyesight failed in his last year, he reviewed grant proposals and was always there to discuss new students’ research applications,” said Alan Almquist, PhD, grants and program officer for the foundation.

Clark is survived by his wife of 64 years, Betty Baume Clark; a daughter, Elizabeth Winterbottom of New South Wales, Australia; a son, John Clark of Kent, England; a sister, Moira Coulson of England; and five grandchildren.

A memorial service will take place from 5 to 7 p.m. Feb. 27 on campus in the Great Hall at the Faculty Club.

“On Saturday, I was a surgeon in South Africa, very little known. On Monday I was world renowned.”

Thus Dr Christian Barnard recalled a weekend in 1967, when he became the first person to perform a heart transplant on a human being.

. . .

The son of a poor Afrikaner preacher from Beaufort West, a town on South Africa’s semi-arid Great Karroo plateau, Barnard walked five miles each day to study at Cape Town University, before becoming a family physician on the Western Cape.

. . .

By 1967, Barnard was a well respected cardiothoracic surgeon at the Groote Schuur Hospital back in Cape Town, and had already conducted many heart experiments on animals.

. . .

Then his patient Louis Washkansky, chose to undergo pioneering surgery, even though the odds against success were slim.

On December 3, Barnard led a 30-man medical team in transferring the heart of a 25-year-old motor victim into Washkansky’s body, and medical history was made. … Read full obituary