Hannah Pick-Goslar
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.”
Samuel L. Katz
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.
Lewis Kuller
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
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.
Henry Rosovsky
Henry Rosovsky, an economic historian who as a Harvard University dean was instrumental in imposing a back-to-basics core curriculum while establishing groundbreaking undergraduate programs in Black and Jewish studies, died on Nov. 11 at his home in Cambridge, MA. He was 95.
What eventually became the Department of Afro-American Studies was considered an underachieving stepchild until 1991, when Professor Rosovsky recruited Henry Louis Gates Jr. from Duke University as its chairman.
He was also the first Jewish dean of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, serving from 1973 to 1984. In 1978, he founded Harvard’s Center for Jewish Studies.
In 1978, following his recommendations, the faculty redefined “an educated person” as one who has an “informed acquaintance” with five academic areas: literature and the arts, history, social and philosophical analysis, science and mathematics, and foreign languages and culture.
Mitchell S. Rosenthal
Dr. Mitchell S. Rosenthal, the founder of Phoenix House, the largest private nonprofit therapeutic drug-treatment program in the United States, died on Nov. 14 in Manhattan. He was 87.
Dr. Rosenthal, a psychiatrist, popularized a regimen of abstinence and group therapy in a communal residential setting where people could recover from drug and alcohol addiction, as well as address other behavioral problems. He started Phoenix House in 1967 in a former flophouse on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The program grew from there into a nationwide network that by the 1990s had residential treatment centers in 10 states and in some prisons. Programs in Britain, the Netherlands and Israel were established on the Phoenix House model.
Jay N. Pasachoff
Jay M. Pasachoff, an astronomer at Williams College who spent more than 50 years traveling the world to observe solar eclipses and, with 74 sightings, probably witnessed more of them than any other human in history, died on Nov. 20 at his home in Williamstown, MA. He was 70.
He was more than just an eclipse fan. He studied the corona, the outermost layer of the sun’s atmosphere, which, being one-millionth as bright as the sun itself, is best studied when the rest of the sun is obscured by the moons — during an eclipse. A focus of his work was testing theories about the corona.
While his contributions to astronomy were many, Dr. Pasachoff was equally adept at encouraging amateurs to share his passion for the night sky.
He and his wife, Naomi, are immortalized in the names of a pair of asteroids: 5100 Pasachoff and 68109 Naomipasachoff.
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