David Botstein, a molecular biologist who changed the course of genetics by discovering a method for locating genes in human DNA, died on Feb. 27 in Palo Alto, CA. He was 83.

Dr. Botstein began his career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the early 1970s, when little was known about genes and how they interact. The human genome was understood to be a vast stretch of DNA, and the idea of locating within it any one of the approximately 20,000 individual genes that build and operate the body was daunting.

Dr. Botstein came up with the solution. The epiphany allowed scientists to find genes for cystic fibrosis, Huntington’s disease and an inherited risk for breast cancer, among many other conditions.

Dr. Morris Waxler, who as a federal health official was instrumental in approving laser eye surgery as a quick fix to replace eyeglasses or contact lenses, and then reversed himself a decade later after concluding that the operation could actually impair a patient’s vision, died on Jan. 2 in a hospital in Madison, Wis. He was 88.

Patients who had undergone Lasik surgery soon began complaining about how their sight had been distorted by halos, dryness, glare and chronic pain. Dr. Waxler revisited the original data and found that what had been claimed as temporary and treatable side effects were, in fact, untreatable, permanent complications.

Although most studies note high levels of success after Lasik, Dr. Waxler said that “even if it’s two percent who are at risk for sight-threatening problems, that’s thousands of people being put at risk every year. What is an acceptable level of risk when you’re operating on healthy eyes?”

Award-winning songwriter Billy Steinberg, who wrote several top hit songs, including Madonna’s “Like a Virgin,” died Feb. 18. He was 75.

Mr. Steinberg wrote some of the biggest pop hits of the 1980s and 1990’s, and was behind songs performed by Whitney Houston Celine Dion, Cyndi Lauper, and Madonna.

“Billy Steinberg’s life was a testament to the enduring power of a well-written song — and to the idea that honesty, when set to music, can outlive us all,” his family said in a statement.

He won a Grammy Award in 1997 for his work on Celine Dion’s “Falling Into You.” He was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2011.

Frederick Wiseman, a director whose rigorously objective explorations of social and cultural institutions constitute one of the more revered bodies of work in American documentary filmmaking, died on Feb. 16 at his home in Cambridge, MA. He was 96.

Mr. Wiseman, who received an honorary Academy Award in 2016, was among the most influential directors of nonfiction cinema.

Mr. Wiseman’s last films were among his best received. The novelist Jay Neugeboren, writing in The New York Review of Books, called “In Jackson Heights” (2015), a panoramic portrait of a  diverse neighborhood, in Queens, “richly textured and sumptuously beautiful.” Reviewing “Ex Libris: The New York Public Library” (2017), Manohla Dargis of The New York Times called it “one of the greatest movies of Mr. Wiseman’s extraordinary career and one of his most thrilling.”

Michael Silverblatt, a ravenous reader and cerebral interviewer whose long-running public radio program, “Bookworm,” provoked authors to see their work in fresh ways and to articulate what drove them to write in the first place, died on Feb. 14 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 73.

Mr. Silverblatt, whose nationally syndicated show aired from 1989 to 2022, once described himself as “a person of ferocious compassion instead of ferocious intellect.” He stunned his guests not only by having thoroughly digested their latest books, but also by having devoured most of their entire output. “He was the reader most writers dream about,” said Joyce Carol Oates.

“There are all sorts of other things that you can get on radio and television,” he told Oprah.com in 2009, “but I wanted listeners of ‘Bookworm’ to hear words, ideas, but partricularly emotions that don’t get discussed in public, if at all elsewhere. That is to say, for one reason or another, the show is a crusade that’s much larger than the subject of books.”

Dick Zimmer, a three-term Republican congressman from New Jersey, who sponsored the landmark legislation known as Megan’s Law, requiring states to disclose where convicted sex offenders are living, died on Dec. 30, 2025, at a nursing care facility in Flemington, NJ. He was 81.

First elected to the House of Representatives in 1990, Mr. Zimmer sponsored Megan’s Law after the 1994 rape and murder of 7-year-old Megan Kanka in Hamilton Township, NJ. Her family had been unaware that her killer, a twice-convicted sex offender, had recently moved in across the street.

The bill was based on similar legislation adopted in New Jersey and in other states. It was passed unanimously by the House and Senate and signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1996.

Gary Graffman, a former child prodigy whose successful international career as a concert pianist was cut short when a rare neurological disorder cost him the use of his right hand in his 50s, setting him on a new and distinguished path as a teacher and administrator, died on Dec. 27 at his home in New York. He was 97.

His performing career lasted until the early 1980s, when he began to suffer from focal dystonia. He never regained use of his right hand, and instead focused on teaching and performing repertory for the left hand.

In his memoir, Mr. Graffman wrote vividly about the pitfalls of live performance. Describing a concert of Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 3 with the conductor George Szell, which almost derailed after a section of the orchestra counted wrong. Mr. Graffman wrote, “I felt like someone who had been tied to the railroad tracks as a train whistle is heard in the distance. But,” he added, “Szell made some magic passes in the air and led the orchestra safely across the Red Sea.”