Sy Presten, a press agent who supplied gags and gossip to newspaper columnists for three-quarters of a century, died on Oct. 18 at his home in Manhattan. He was 98.

His was an era when national attention was focused on New York theater, sports and nightlife. Readers wanted to know what was happening at the Stork Club and the Copacabana. The proprietors of those establishments used Mr. Presten as their press agent, who would gin up publicity for major figures there, like Kate Smith and Charles Revson and Elizabeth Taylor watching Sammy Davis Jr. at the Copa.

According to The New York Times, until the end of his life, Mr. Presten remained haunted by a rare lapse in his never-ending hustle. About 10 years ago, the gossip columnist Liz Smith invited him out to lunch at a nice restaurant near her home. She refused to let him pay. According to the dogma of zealous press agentry, the event constituted blasphemy. “He was talking about it to his dying day,” his wife said. “He wanted to pick up that check.”

Gael Greene, who reinvented the art of the restaurant review with sass and sensuality in four decades as New York magazine’s restaurant critic, died on Nov. 1 at her home in an assisted living facility in Manhattan. She was 88.

Until her death, Ms. Greene was chairwoman of Citymeals on Wheels, a New York charity she helped create in the early 1980s to provide food for the elderly.

She embarked on her assignment for New York with great flair. A fan of the New Journalism, she put a premium on lively prose and colorful detail, throwing overboard the pompousness of the professional gourmets who dominated the profession. She cast an amused eye over her surroundings and shared the pleasures of her plate with enthusiasm, scrutinizing the tables and offerings at renowned restaurants like La Grenouille and 21.

“I wake every day full of hope that I will discover some great new restaurant of a glorious new dish or even an enchanting new flavor,” Ms. Greene wrote in an autobiographical note for the reference work Contemporary Authors. “I have dedicated myself to the wanton indulgence of my senses. And I shall consider it fitting and divine if on my deathbed my last words echo those of Pierrette the sister of Brillat-Savarin, who died at table shortly before her one-hundredth birthday: ‘Bring on the dessert. I think I’m about to die.’”

Hannah Pick-Goslar, whose close friendship with Anne Frank was memorialized in what became “The Diary of a Young Girl, the record of Anne’s life in hiding from the Nazis, died on Oct. 28 at her home in Jerusalem. She was 93.

The two girls’ friendship began when they were in kindergarten in Amsterdam in 1933. Twelve years later, Mrs. Pick-Goslar spoke to her friend for the final time through a barbed-wire fence stuffed with straw at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and tossed her scraps of food in a sock.

For many years, Hannah spoke widely about the Holocaust — and she had a cleareyed sense of who Anne Frank was, the New York Times said. “Today everyone thinks she was someone holy, but this is not at all the case,” she told The Associated Press in 1998. “She was a girl who wrote beautifully and matured quickly during extraordinary circumstances.”

Dr. Samuel L. Katz, a virologist who was part of the research team at Harvard Medical School that developed the measles vaccine, an advance more than half a century ago that has saved countless lives, died on Oct. 31 at his home in Chapel Hill, NC. He was 95.

Dr. Katz took up the fight against measles in 1956, when he joined a laboratory at Children’s Hospital Medical Center, now Boston Children’s Hospital. Measles was a major medical threat at the time. In the decade before the vaccine was made available in 1963, nearly every child in the United States had measles by age 15, with three to four million people infected by it every year, leading to an estimated 400 to 500 deaths annually, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Worldwide, measles killed 2.6 million people a year before the availability of vaccines, the World Health Organization said.

Dr. Katz brought a prototype vaccine to Nigeria in 1961 to immunize children who were highly susceptible to measles because their systems had been weakened by malaria, intestinal worms, vitamin A. deficiency and protein depletion. He vaccinated children in a village there, and they developed immunity.

The measles vaccine was licensed in 1963 and soon became widely available; eight years later, it was incorporated into the combined measles, mumps and rubella vaccine.

Dr. Katz chaired the CDC’s advisory committee on immunization practices from 1985 to 1993. He received the 2003 Albert B. Sabin Gold Medal, which is given to public. Health leaders who save lives through vaccines.

Dr. Lewis Kuller, a top epidemiologist and a leading figure in preventive cardiology, died on Oct. 25, in a Pittsburgh hospital. He was 88.

In his career of more than 60 years, he studied risk factors for cardiovascular disease through a breadth of clinical trials, much of that time as chairman of the epidemiology department at the University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health.

In the 1970s and ‘80s, Dr. Kuller was the chief investigator in the 10-year Multiple Risk Factor Intervention Trial, colloquially known as “Mr. Fit.” It involved nearly 13,000 men between the ages of 35 and 57, and focused on reducing the risks of heart disease through aggressive intervention by treating blood pressure and high cholesterol and counseling cigarette smokers.

In the 1980s and continuing for nearly 25 years, Dr. Kuller was the architect of a trial called the Healthy Women Study, which demonstrated that menopause was a risk factor for cardiovascular disease.

In 1985, Dr. Kuller’s “Mr. Fit” study became a cause célèbre when an advertisement published in 25 newspapers and magazines by the R.J. Reynolds tobacco company used it to say that the study had failed to find a clear link between smoking and heart disease.

Dr. Kuller told The Washington Post that the study did not test the link because the evidence on the connection was a long-settled scientific issue. In response to the Reynolds ad, Dr. Kuller told The Post, “It’s like an ad that says, ‘Eat a carcinogen — we need more time to think about the issue.’”

Ellen Levine, Good Housekeeping’s first female top editor, whose keen sense of what American women wanted from a magazine also led her to success as Hearst Magazines’ editorial director and Oprah Winfrey’s partner in creating an instant newsstand hit, O, the Oprah Magazine, died on Nov. 6 at her home in Manhattan. She was 76.

Ms. Levine massaged Good Housekeeping’s  mix of diet, entertaining and relationship advice, broadening the appeal to working mothers with consumer-oriented reporting — articles about social and political issues, and coverage of career matters like pay equity, and health topics like smoking, heart disease and mental illness.

She was cleareyed about who her mass-market readers were. “I’m not editing for the person addicted to high-fashion magazines,” she told The New York Times in 2003. She knew her audience.