Fred Fay died unexpectedly at 53 years of age while working with colleagues in Germany. Fred spent most of his career at the University of Massachusetts Medical School where he had been one of the founding faculty members. His biological interests were the contractile mechanisms of smooth muscle and chemotaxis, but Fred’s greatest enthusiasm was for instrumentation. Fred invented new ways to se...

Quickly I narrowed down my interests to two main areas: the borderline between the living and the nonliving, and the workings of the brain. Further introspection showed me that what these two subjects had in common was that they touched on problems which, in many circles, seemed beyond the power of science to explain. He was fortunate to get a studentship in Max Perutz's group in the Cavendish ...

There is a law of the conservation of energy or matter, and a law of the conservation of spirit. Grover Powers' immortality is in our transmission to students and their students and their students' students of the cultural heritage. he received from his forebears and preceptors and transmitted to us. Eloquent memorials have been presented* by Edward Wakeman and Herbert Miller before the Pediatr...

Herbert L. Needleman, MD, pediatrician, child psychiatrist, and hero for children’s environmental health, died in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on 18 July 2017. Needleman was one of the world’s foremost researchers on lead poisoning. He conducted seminal studies that illuminated with great clarity the enduring impacts of lead on children’s health. He was a deeply moral man with a strong sense of so...

Greg was a virtuoso lecturer who delivered superb solo performances over which he labored with an obsession. He created just the right slides that would help “tell the story,” and oh, how Greg loved to tell a story. ButwhatGreg lovedbestwastheroleof impresario.Hewas a wizard at bringing the right people with diversified talents and tastes together and setting before them a common and ambitious ...

Since 1839, Yale medical students have been writing theses as part of their professional training. It is an introduction to the practice of original research, a demanding and sometimes exhausting pursuit. The thesis project promotes a tenacity well suited for the practice of medicine. The thesis advisor has a challenging role as well — one that can only be filled by an individual whose dedicati...

OnMay3 of this year, cell biology lost a giantwith the untimely passing of Alan Hall (Fig. 1). Alan didn’t discover the Rho family of GTPases but, more than anyone else, he and his laboratory brought these key regulatory proteins to the prominent position that they now occupy. I first met Alan in the early 1990s shortly after his landmark papers with Anne Ridley were published (Ridley and Hall,...

Figure 1. Rita Levi-Montalcini, born April 22, 1909; died December, 30, 2012 On January 2, 2013, Rita Levi-Montalcini was laid to rest at the Cimitero Monumentale in Turin, Italy, the city where she was born more than 103 years ago and where she started her medical and scientific career. Her death was reported by all major news media (BBC News, The Economist, The Guardian, The New York Times, T...

Maurice Gross (1934-2001) was both a great linguist and a pioneer in natural language processing. This article is written in homage to his memory. Maurice Gross is remembered as a vital man surrounded by a lively group, constituted by his laboratory, the LADL, and by his international network, RELEX. He and his group always resolutely steered away from any kind of abstemiousness or abstinence. ...