Tag Archives: Deaths (Obituaries)

Susan F. Wood, a women’s health expert who resigned in protest from the Food and Drug Administration in 2005, accusing the agency of knuckling under to politics by not approving over-the-counter sales of the morning-after pill known as Plan B, died on Jan. 17 at her home in London. She was 66. The cause was glioblastoma multiforme, a brain cancer, …

Ernest Drucker, a pioneering public-health researcher who approached drug addiction with compassion, invigorated needle-exchange programs to stem the AIDS epidemic and diagnosed the destructive impact of what he called a “plague” of mass incarceration, died on Jan. 26 at his home in Manhattan. He was 84. The cause was complications of dementia, his son, Jesse Drucker, said. For more than …

Karen Pryor once taught a hermit crab to ring a bell by pulling a string with its claw. She taught a cat to play the piano (ham was involved) and, most impressive, her mother to stop complaining on the phone. Ms. Pryor, whose experience as a dolphin trainer showed her how positive reinforcement could be used to train just about …

Loretta Ford, who co-founded the first academic program for nurse practitioners in 1965, then spent decades transforming the field of nursing into an area of serious clinical practice, education and research, died on Jan. 22 at her home in Wildwood, Fla. She was 104. Her daughter, Valerie Monrad, confirmed the death. Today there are more than 350,000 nurse practitioners in …

Carol Downer, a leader in the feminist women’s health movement who drew national fame for her role in a case known as the Great Yogurt Conspiracy — so named because she was charged with practicing medicine without a license for dispensing yogurt to treat a yeast infection — died on Jan. 13 in Glendale, Calif. She was 91. Her death, …

Derek Humphry, a British-born journalist whose experience helping his terminally-ill wife end her life led him to become a crusading pioneer in the right-to-die movement and publish “Final Exit,” a best-selling guide to suicide, died on Jan. 2 in Eugene, Ore. He was 94. His death, at a hospice facility, was announced by his family. With a populist flair and …

Howard Buten, a college dropout from Detroit, juggled three extraordinary lives. In one, he was a tender, clumsy and wordless red-nosed clown named Buffo. He sold out theaters around the world. Critics compared him to Charlie Chaplin and Harpo Marx. In another, he volunteered as an aide with autistic children, went back to school to earn a doctorate in psychology, …

Martin Karplus, a Nobel Prize-winning theoretical chemist who used computers to model how complex systems change during chemical reactions, a process that has led to advances in the understanding of biological processes, died on Dec. 28 at his home in Cambridge, Mass. He was 94. His wife, Marci Karplus, said he died while recovering from a fall in which he …

J. Fraser Stoddart, a Scottish-born scientist who went from playing with construction sets as a boy to building molecular machines a thousand times smaller than the width of a human hair, known as nanomachines, for which he shared the 2016 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, died on Dec. 30 in Melbourne, Australia. He was 82. Alison Margaret Stoddart, his daughter, said …

James Arthur Ray, an Oprah-endorsed motivational speaker who spent two years in prison for manslaughter after the 2009 deaths of three people in a sweat lodge, the culmination of a three-day spiritual program he ran in the Arizona desert, died on Jan. 3 in Henderson, Nev. He was 67. His brother, Jon Ray, announced the death on social media. He …