In his testimony before the American Psychiatric Association, Dr. Charles Silverstein persuaded the association to change the language of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manuel of Mental Disorders, forging a path that ultimately ended the profession’s pathologizing of homosexuality. Dr. Silverstein died on Jan. 30 at his home in Manhattan. He was 87.

Dr. Silverstein wrote books about gay sex, and served as founding editor of The Journal of Homosexuality that worked to break down prejudices associated with being gay. In 1973, he started the Institute for Human Identity to provide health services to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender clients.

Paul Berg, a 1980 Nobel Prize-winning biochemist who ushered in the era of genetic engineering in 1971 by successfully combining DNA from two different organisms, died on Feb. 15 at his home on the Stanford University campus in California. He was 96.

Dr. Berg provided the initial links in the chain of advances that has led to the genetic engineering of new therapeutic treatments for diseases and vaccines against viruses, like Covid-19.

“Nurturing curiosity and the instinct to seek solutions are perhaps the most important contributions education can make. I have never lost the excitement of discovery,” he said.

Howard Bragman, a publicist who often helped the famous and the reluctantly famous navigate embarrassing or volatile moments, and who also advised gay clients coming forward, died Feb. 11 in Los Angeles. He was 66.

Over his career, he promoted products and announced engagements and deaths, but clients often made use of his services in times of crisis. Ed McMahon called on Mr. Bragman when he faced possible foreclosure on his multi-million-dollar home in Beverly Hills. When Anthony Scaramucci was dismissed as Donald J. Trump’s White House communications director just a few days into the job, he hired Mr. Bragman to help orchestrate his political afterlife. For other actors and athletes going public as gay, Mr. Bragman was their counselor.

In his book, Where’s My Fifteen minutes, Mr. Bragman cited the biblical story of Moses, who was reluctant to deliver the messages God wanted delivered, so God told him to bring along Aaron, his brother, who was more eloquent and could do the talking. “So a lot of us in public relations believe that Aaron is actually the first practitioner of our craft,” Mr. Bragman wrote, “thus making public relations the third oldest profession, slightly behind spycraft and prostitution. We get accused of both of those as well.”

Marianne Mantell who in her early 20s helped start the audiobook revolution by co-founding, with Barbara Holdridge, Caedmon Records, a spoken-word company that turned recordings of literary giants, including Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce and Dylan Thomas, into mass-market entertainment, died on Jan. 22 at her home in Princeton, NJ. She was 93.

Success came quickly. Caedmon’s first release, an album by Dylan Thomas whose centerpiece was his short story, “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” sold more than 400,000 copies during the 1950s and went on to become a holiday perennial. Other recordings featured T.S. Eliot, Sylvia Plath, William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes and Gertrude Stein, all interpreting their own works.

“We were not just out to preserve celebrity voices (to the extent that a poet is a celebrity),” she wrote for AudioFile. “Our purpose was literary: To capture on tape as nearly as possible what the poet heard in his head as he wrote.”

Richard Belzer, the comedian and actor best known for playing the acerbic Detective John Munch across a number of NBC crime dramas, including “Law & Order: SVU,” over more than two decades, died Feb. 19, at his home in France.

Over the course of his career, Belzer portrayed a detective in 11 television series, including “The Wire” and “The X-Files.” He made crossover appearances in-character in the comedies “30 Rock,” “Arrested Development,” and “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.” In a statement posted to the Twitter account for Wolf Entertainment, “Law & Order” producer Dick Wolf said Belzer’s Munch character was “one of television’s iconic characters.”

Long-time co-star Mariska Hargitay wrote on Instagram, “I will miss you, your unique light, and your singular take on this strange world. I feel blessed to have known you and adored you and work with you, side by side, for so many years.”                                                         Getty Images/Francois Durand

One day after the Feb. 19 death of Richard Belzer, the long-time MC at Rick Newman’s Catch A Rising Star comedy club on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, The New York Times reported the death of Rick Newman himself, who in 1972 had opened the trendy club where Billy Crystal, Robin Williams, Freddie Prinze, Jay Leno and countless other comedians did some of their earliest work.

“On any given night, you might catch singers, comics, musicians, jugglers or animal acts ranging from near professional to downright awful,” The Daily News wrote in 1973, four months after Catch opened. “Hope springs so eternal, an 83-year-old hoofer recently took a turn.” The newspaper noted that a sign above the stage read, “All entertainers must leave the stage instantly if any objects are thrown.”

Agents frequented the club, looking for promising talent. Although it was best known for comedy, Pat Benatar turned up at an open mic night in 1975, when she was working as a cabaret singer.

Ted Lerner, the billionaire real estate developer who bought the Washington Nationals in 2006 for $450 million and oversaw their thrilling rise to 2019 World Series victors, rewarding his native city with its first major league championship in 95 years, died on Sunday, Feb. 19, at his home in Chevy Chase, MD. He was 97.

“In my first legal case, the court appointed me to represent a parking attendant charged with stealing the cars he was parking,” Mr. Lerner wrote in ForbesLife magazine in 2013. “I got his sentence reduced from two years to six months, and he promptly left town without paying me. I figured there had to be a more rewarding way to make a living.”

Reportedly, he borrowed $250 from his wife to get started in real estate.” From that start, he built more than 20 million square feet of commercial and residential space, The New York Times said.