It’s that season. Not only are there few new papers to consider this week, it seems almost requisite that we do a look-back at those people whose contributions literally shaped the world we live in — often without our knowing it. On this list is a man who helped create almost everything you’re using at this very moment, and both men and women whose work on everything from antibiotics to imaging is likely responsible for several of us being present to read about their departure. And there’s Maryam Mirzakhani, whose loss at age 40 is almost unfathomable.
If the list seems a little space-heavy … that’s my fault. I’m still that kid who stuck mission stickers from Mercury and Gemini on his lunch box and we’ve reached that point where the people who worked on those missions — and on Apollo and on Skylab — are becoming fewer and fewer.
The number of human beings who walked on the moon and are still here to tell the story is down to six. There are 15 people still alive who have ventured beyond Earth orbit. I’m still hopeful that new members will join that club before the number dwindles to zero.
Come inside let’s say goodbye.
In Memoriam
Jan 10: The man who drew a target on genes
Oliver Smithies had a habit of inventing ways to do the experiments he wanted to do, and crafted tools that are now used widely in biology. He won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2007 for developing methods to genetically modify individual mammalian genes.
Jan 16: The last man on on the moon
Eugene Cernan, the last man to walk on the moon, died Monday, Jan. 16, surrounded by his family. …
Cernan, a Captain in the U.S. Navy, left his mark on the history of exploration by flying three times in space, twice to the moon. He also holds the distinction of being the second American to walk in space and the last human to leave his footprints on the lunar surface.
Jan 19: He pulled antibiotics from the soil
H. Boyd Woodruff, a farmer’s son whose groundbreaking research enabled fellow scientists to harvest an arsenal of lifesaving antibiotics from ordinary dirt, died on Jan. 19 at his home in Watchung, N.J. He was 99.
Jan 27: The “Godfather of energy efficiency”
Arthur Hinton Rosenfeld passed away Friday January 27, 2017. He was 90 years old.
Over the course of his career he inspired thousands of students, post-docs, and other researchers to make the world a better (and more efficient) place, and motivated policy-makers to adopt these ideas with a combination of personal charm and convincing analysis. His quick wit, enthusiasm, and unrivaled personal energy made him a beloved figure in the world of energy efficiency policy and technology.
Feb 7: He made data “sing”
It was his first Ted talk that thrust renowned Swedish academic Hans Rosling into the international spotlight in 2006, billed as the man in whose hands data sings. Since then, the statistician more likely to illustrate an idea with a few multi-coloured lego bricks than a PowerPoint has been described as everything from a data guru to a Jedi master of data visualisation.
Feb 11: If you’ve ever had an MRI …
Sir Peter Mansfield, who shared a Nobel Prize for discoveries that underpinned the invention of magnetic resonance imaging, the method of peering inside the human body that revolutionized medicine, died on Wednesday. He was 83.
Feb 20: Idol to millions, Medal of Freedom winner, and “Queen of carbon”
Mildred S. Dresselhaus, a celebrated and beloved MIT professor whose research helped unlock the mysteries of carbon, the most fundamental of organic elements — earning her the nickname “queen of carbon science” — died Monday at age 86.
Dresselhaus, a solid-state physicist who was Institute Professor Emerita of Physics and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, was also nationally known for her work to develop wider opportunities for women in science and engineering. She died at Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts, following a brief period of poor health.
“Yesterday, we lost a giant — an exceptionally creative scientist and engineer who was also a delightful human being,” MIT President L. Rafael Reif wrote in an email today sharing the news of Dresselhaus’s death with the MIT community. “Among her many ‘firsts,’ in 1968, Millie became the first woman at MIT to attain the rank of full, tenured professor. She was the first solo recipient of a Kavli Prize and the first woman to win the National Medal of Science in Engineering.”
Mar 4: The “Father of Transplantation”
Dr. Thomas E. Starzl, known as the “father of transplantation” for his role in pioneering and advancing organ transplantation from a risky, rare procedure to an accessible surgery for the neediest patients, died peacefully Saturday, March 4, 2017, at his home in Pittsburgh.
Mar 13: Inventor of Tetracycline
Lloyd H. Conover, a scientist who had the simple idea of exchanging an atom in one antibiotic to create a new, better one — tetracycline — that became one of the most widely used drugs of its kind and heralded a new era in the treatment of infection, died March 11 at a retirement community in St. Petersburg, Fla. He was 93. …
His creation, tetracycline, is used to treat conditions ranging from acne to pneumonia to Lyme disease to sexually transmitted disease. Beyond its clinical applications, the drug revealed vast new potential for man-made antibiotics.
Apr 13: The guy who created nearly everything you’re using right now
Like many inventions, the internet was the work of countless hands. But perhaps no one deserves more credit for that world-changing technological leap than Robert W. Taylor, who died on Thursday at 85 at his home in Woodside, Calif. …
A half-decade later, at Xerox’s storied Palo Alto Research Center in Northern California, Mr. Taylor was a key figure in another technological breakthrough: funding the design of the Alto computer, which is widely described as the forerunner of the personal computer.
Mr. Taylor even had a vital role in the invention of the computer mouse.
May 4: Last of the polio vaccine pioneers
Julius Youngner, an inventive virologist whose nearly fatal childhood illness destined him to become a medical researcher and a core member of the team that developed the Salk polio vaccine in 1955, died on April 27 at his home in Pittsburgh. He was 96.
Oct 22: Pilot to America’s first space station
Former astronaut Paul “P.J.” Weitz, 85, died Sunday, Oct. 22, at his home at Flagstaff. He was a veteran of two spaceflights and a former deputy director of NASA’s Johnson Space Center.
Weitz was selected as part of the fifth class of astronauts, hired in April 1966. He served as pilot on Skylab-2, the first crewed mission to America’s first space station, and commander of space shuttle Challenger’s STS-6 mission, before moving into other leadership positions at NASA. In all, he spent 33 days in space, and 28 years in service at the agency.
Jul 14: The only woman to ever win the Fields Medal
Stanford mathematics Professor Maryam Mirzakhani, the first and to-date only female winner of the Fields Medal since its inception in 1936, died Friday, July 14. She had been battling breast cancer since 2013; the disease spread to her liver and bones in 2016. Mirzakhani was 40 years old. She died at Stanford Hospital.
The quadrennial Fields Medal, which Mirzakhani won in 2014, is the most prestigious award in mathematics, often equated in stature with the Nobel Prize. Mirzakhani specialized in theoretical mathematics that read like a foreign language by those outside of mathematics: moduli spaces, Teichmüller theory, hyperbolic geometry, Ergodic theory and symplectic geometry.
Jul 18: He got the lead out
Herbert L. Needleman, a pediatrician and psychiatrist who demonstrated in the late 1970s that children exposed to even small amounts of lead could suffer intellectual and behavioral deficits, a finding that spurred and emboldened wide-ranging safety regulations, died July 18 at an assisted living center in Pittsburgh. He was 89. …
Dr. Needleman, who was associated most recently with the University of Pittsburgh, spent the better part of his professional life crusading against what he termed the “national disaster” of lead poisoning among children.
Jul 23: The man who led India into space
Udupi Ramachandra Rao, the grand old man of Indian space programme, is no more. ...
ISRO credits him with establishing the development of indigenous satellite technology, giving thrust to early rocket development efforts with the ASLV and the PSLV.
Jul 28: The woman who showed that fun and friends were good for the brain
Marian Cleeves Diamond, one of the founders of modern neuroscience who was the first to show that the brain can change with experience and improve with enrichment, and who discovered evidence of this in the brain of Albert Einstein, died July 25 at the age of 90 at her home in Oakland.
… she showed that an enriched environment — toys and companions — changed the anatomy of the brain. The implication was that the brains of all animals, including humans, benefit from an enriched environment, and that impoverished environments can lower the capacity to learn.
Sep 5: He evaded the Nazis, made contributions in many fields, and won the Nobel
Nicolaas Bloembergen, a Dutch-born American scientist who ate tulip bulbs to survive during World War II and went on to win the Nobel Prize in physics, died Sept. 5 at a retirement community in Tucson. He was 97. …
Over a much-honored career that included 40 years on the faculty of Harvard University, Dr. Bloembergen became a pioneer and major contributor in three significant areas of physics, all of which have significant applications in daily life.
He was one of the pioneers in the development of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) techniques, which have become invaluable to modern medicine for creating images of the tissues of the body.
Oct 3: The doctor of sleep
Dr. Michel Jouvet, a neurophysiologist who discovered the region of the brain that controls rapid eye movement, and who helped define REM sleep as a unique state of consciousness common to humans and animals alike, was found dead on Oct. 3 in Villeurbanne, France. He was 91.
Oct 3: From the Manhattan project to drug discovery
Renowned crystallographer Isabella L. Karle died on Oct. 3 in Arlington, Va. She was 95. …
Early in her career, Karle worked on the Manhattan Project, developing techniques to extract plutonium chloride from a mixture containing plutonium oxide. She became the first woman faculty member in the chemistry department at the University of Michigan. Later on, at NRL, she and her husband Jerome Karle determined the structure of hundreds of biological molecules that helped revolutionize drug development.
Nov 6: Gemini and Apollo pilot
Former NASA astronaut Richard Gordon, command module pilot on Apollo 12, the second lunar landing mission, passed away on Nov. 6, 2017.
Gordon, a retired U. S. Navy captain, became an astronaut in 1963. He spent more than 316 hours in space on two missions. He was the pilot for the three-day Gemini 11 mission in 1966 and performed two spacewalks. At the time of the flight, Gemini 11 set the world altitude record of 850 miles.
Dec 15: The champion of using innovation to lift up a continent
To outsiders, Calestous Juma's rise from humble origins in a remote Kenyan village to an internationally recognized Harvard scholar, science writer and public intellectual, might have seemed improbable. But as Juma himself liked to tell the story, he learned innovation from his parents, whose poverty meant that they constantly had to change to survive. …
Even toward the end of his life, in failing health and having lost his famous shock of grey hair after months of cancer treatment, Juma lost none of his irrepressible good humor. He charmed the audience at The Breakthrough Institute conference in June 2017, where he was awarded The Breakthrough Prize. In a spirit of typical generosity, he immediately donated the prize monies back to the Institute for its young fellows training program.
Dec 23: The first man to fly free in space
Former astronaut Bruce McCandless II, famously captured in a 1984 photo documenting the first untethered flight in space, has died, NASA said. He was 80.
McCandless flew alongside the space shuttle Challenger in a jetpack-style craft called a Manned Maneuvering Unit, using his hands to control his movement a few meters away from the shuttle. It was the first-ever spacewalk that didn't employ "restrictive tethers and umbilicals," NASA said.
And now on a more cheerful note for 2018 … here’s NASA’s video to-do list