Midge Decter, a writer and editor who abandoned liberalism to help lay the intellectual foundation for the neoconservative movement and the so-called culture wars over feminism, gay rights, and other social issues, died on May 9 at her home in Manhattan. She was 94.

Midge Decter was in the forefront of an ideologically evolving generation of public intellectuals focused on leftist politics from the 1930s through the early 1960s. Jolted by the turbulence of the student and women’s movements, they later broke from liberals to embrace a new form of conservatism that championed traditional social values. Ms. Decter wielded her influence as editor of Harper’s and other magazines, as an author and book editor, and as a political organizer and frequent speaker.

She served on the boards of conservative think tanks, including the Heritage Foundation, the Center for Security Policy, and the Hoover Institution. In 2003, she received the National Humanities Medal from President Bush in a White House Ceremony. 

Morton Mower, a cardiologist who helped invent an implantable defibrillator that has saved many lives by returning potentially fatal irregular heart rhythms to normal with an electrical jolt, died on April 25 in Denver. He was 89.

Dr. Mower and Dr. Michel Mirowski, a colleague at Sinai Hospital in Baltimore, began work in 1969 on a device that would be small enough that it could be implanted under the skin of the abdomen and quickly correct a heart’s rhythms when they go dangerously awry. “We were the crazy guys who wanted to put a time bomb in people’s chests,” Dr. Mower said in 2015 in an interview with the medical journal The Lancet, which noted at the time that two million people around the world had received the implantable device.

Dr. Mower’s work in resetting the heart’s rhythms didn’t end with the implantable defibrillator. He and Dr. Mirowski went on to invent cardiac resynchronization therapy, which uses an implantable device much like a pacemaker to send electrical impulses to the right and left ventricles of the heart in order to force them to contract in a more efficient, organized pattern.

Yuri Averbakh, a Russian chess grandmaster who was among the world’s best players for a decade, trained world champions and was the last surviving participant in one of the greatest competitions in history, died on May 7 in Moscow. He was 100.

The historic contest in which Mr. Averbakh took part was the Candidates Tournament in Zurich in 19563, the final step in the cycle to select a challenger for the world championship. The tournament was notable not only for the participants but also for the quality of the games played; many chess experts consider four or five of them among the most memorable in chess history, including one that Mr. Averbakh lost to Alexander Kotov in Round 14 after Mr. Kotov “uncorked a spectacular queen sacrifice,” The New York Times said.

In 1962, he became editor of the two most prestigious Soviet chess magazines, Shakhmatny Bulletin and Shakhmaty v SSSR. He edited them for 37 years. Mr. Averbakh was appointed president of the Soviet Chess Federation in 1972, a privileged position in Soviet society, regarded much like elite athletes. “I never obtained great pleasure from winning,” he once wrote. “On the other hand, I did not like to lose, and the bitterness of defeat was in no way compensated for by the pleasure of winning.”

Susan Nussbaum, a playwright and novelist whose work reflected her concerns for the rights of people with disabilities, died on April 28 at her home in the Lakeview neighborhood of Chicago. She was 68.

Sher began using a wheelchair after she was hit by a car at age 24 and soon became an integral part of Chicago’s burgeoning disability-rights scene. Incensed by a lack of accessibility in the city for theater people with disabilities, she wrote her own plays, starring herself and other disabled actors.

Her activism extended outside Chicago as well. She visited Nicaragua and Cuba as a member of coalitions on disability rights. Later in life, she founded a Chicago organization for disabled young women seeking to explore their sexuality.

Ben Roy Mottelson, an American-Danish theoretical physicist who shared a Nobel Prize for revealing how the motion of protons and neutrons could distort the shape of the nuclei of atoms, died on May 13. He was 95.

Dr. Mottelson was awarded the Nobel in physics in 1975 along with James Rainwater, a Columbia University physicist, and Aage Bohr, a Danish scientist whose father, Niels Bohr, was awarded the Nobel in physics in 1922.

The three scientists’ discoveries about the nuclei of atoms had an impact on the development of human-made nuclear fusion, which generates energy by combining hydrogen atoms. Dr. Mottelson and Dr. Bohr later expanded their work, publishing two encyclopedic books, Nuclear Structure: Single Particle Motion, and Nuclear Structure: Nuclear Deformations. The books remain standard references.

The Shofar joins the membership in mourning the death of Gayle Krueger, sister of shul member Miriam Gabriel, on March 28. May her memory be for a blessing.

Martin Pope, a physical chemist whose fundamental work on molecular semiconductors led to the development of organic light-emitting diodes, which are used in digital cameras, mobile phones, solar panels and televisions, died March 27 at his home in Brooklyn. He was 103.

In the early 1960s, Dr. Pope published one of his most important papers, “Electroluminescence in Organic Crystals,” which reported that electricity could be used to generate light from an organic compound called anthracene. “That was a milestone that has found root in the high-performance displays we’re seeing today,” said Richard Friend, as physicist at the University of Cambridge.

Dr. Pope’s insight into some of the strange quantum mechanical phenomena shown by another organic compound, tetracene, also turned out to be well ahead of its time. In a paper published in 1969, he demonstrated the possibility of producing two excited molecules, or excitons, in a tetracene crystal after just one photon of light was absorbed in it. The result, Dr. Pope said, “proved that the efficiency of converting light into useful electric current is greatly increased.” The practical application of the discovery is that it offers a way to improve the efficiency of solar cells.

In 2006, the Royal Society awarded Dr. Pope the Davy Medal, given annually to a scientist whose research helped bring about extraordinary advances in any field of chemistry. In a 2011 interview, Dr. Pope said he was surprised by the practical application of his discovery. “At the time I carried out my research, I did not have the faintest idea that it would become of worldwide importance.”