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THE NEW YORK TIMES OBITUARIES WEDNESDAY, MAY 23, 2007 Stanley Miller, Who Examined origins of Life, Dies at 77 By NICHOLAS WADE Stanley L. Miller, a scientist whose spectacular discovery as a young graduate student pioneered the study of the origin of life on earth, died Sunday at a hospital near his home in National City, Calif. He was 77. The cause was heart failure, said his brother, Donald Miller. Dr. Miller was known for a classic experiment that he performed as a graduate student and published in 1953. The expirement showed how amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, could easily be generated from the simple chemicals assumed to have been present on the primitive earth. The finding caught the imagination of scientists everywhere by suggesting that it might soon be possible to reconstruct the emergence of the first living cells from the soup of chemicals generated by natural conditions on the earthly earth. Dr. Miller had opened an experimental approach toward one of the hardest remaining problems in biology. He spent much of the rest of his scientific career at the University of California, San Diego, doing celebrations of his famous experiment and showing how more and more of the basic chemicals used by living cells could have arisen under natural conditions. But despite the brilliant beginning, neither he nor others were able to take the next step, that of providing a plausible mechanism by which these chemicals could have been assembled into living cells or the macromolecules-DNA and proteins-on which cells depend. In the last decade, a rival theory, advocated by the chemist Gunter Wachtershauser and others, held by Dr. Miller's approach was a blind alley. Dr. Wachtershauser argued that life was more likely to have arisen in the exotic conditions near volcanoes, driven by metal catalysts, not in the more natural conditions simulated in Dr. Miller's experiments Dr. Miller, defending his approach, said that his rival's theory was "overblown" and that it failed to show how copious amounts of amino acids could be produced, as he had done. The origin of the Miller experiment lay in the work by the geochemist Harold Urey, of the University of Chicago, who argued in 1951 that the atmosphere of the early earth would have consisted of water vapour, ammonia and methane, with no oxygen. Mr. Miller, then a doctoral student at the university, was looking for a new thesis because of the departure of his adviser, the nuclear physicist Edward Teller. He approached Dr. Urey suggesting an experiment to simulate the chemistry of early earth, assuming an atmosphere like the one Dr. Urey has proposed. [[Image]] James A. Sugar Dr. Stanley L. Miller in 1999. Dr. Urey at first discouraged him, believing the experiment would take too long for a graduate student. But Mr. Miller persisted. He set up a flask of water to represent the oceans, connected to a flask of gases through which he passed electrical discharges to represent lightning. After just two days, there were signs that glycine, a simple amino acid, had been created, and by the end of the week several more of life's essential building blocks had turned up in the seething mixture. "He was the feet off the floor," said Donald Miller, his older brother and a physical chemist. Mr. Miller wrote up his findings dutifully added his supervisor's name. But Dr. Urey told him to take it off, explaining, "'I've already got my Nobel Price,'" Dr. Donald Miller said. Dr. Urey told Mr. Miller to send the paper to Science, a leading journal, but, infuriated by its delays, he had the article resubmitted to The Journal of the American Chemical Society. This maneuver extracted a promise of quick publication from Science, which Mr. Miller accepted, his former student Jeffrey L. Bada recounted in a recent article in that journal. Donald Miller said that he had recently asked his brother why he, too, had become a chemist and that Stanley had replied, "I followed you." Besides his brother, Dr. Miller is survived by his companion, Maria Morris. Dr. Stanley Miller was doubly fortunate in making an outstanding discovery at a young age and in having a supervisor generous enough to let him have full credit for it. His finding was published in the same year as James Watson's and Francis Crick's discovery of the structure of DNA. But it has proved much harder to build on, and the origins of life on earth remain obscure despite Dr. Miller's impressive initial assault on the problem. Marian Radke-Yarrow,89,Child Psychology Researcher By DENNIS HEVESI Marian Radke-Yarrow, a researcher in child psychology who conducted many influential studies on a range of sensitive issues - including prejudice among elementary school pupils, depression in very young children and indications of altruistic impulses even in 1-year-olds - died on Saturday at her home in Bethesda, Md. She was 89. The cause was leukemia, said her son, Andrew Yarrow. Dr. Radke-Yarrow was chief of the developmental psychology laboratory at the National Institute of Mental Health, a division of the National Institute of Mental Health, from 1974 to 1995. Her studies, which sometimes involved observations of families over several decades, have been published in books and scientific journals since the 1940s. Studying sensitive issues like prejudice in grade schoolers. Her research on anti-Semitism and racial prejudice in the late 1940s and early '50s, including her book "They Learn What They Live: Prejudice in Young Children" (Harper & Brothers, 1952), written with Helen G. Trager, was included as evidence in the Supreme Court's landmark Brown v. Board of Education desegregation decision in 1954. The book examined the roots of prejudice, including self-hatred, among 250 students 5 to 8 years old at public schools in Philadelphia. Starting in the 1970s, Dr. Radke-Yarrow spent 20 years observing interactions between chronically depressed parents and their children, documenting the perhaps not surprising assumption that the children were susceptible to serious depression as they matured. The study, published in the book "Risk and Protective Factors in the Development of Psychopathology" (Cambridge University Press, 1989), offered clues on how some children seemed to thrive against the odds. One 9-year-old girl whose mother was seriously depressed and whose father was an alcoholic, for example, seemed happy and well liked at school ,where she excelled. Her resilience, Dr. Radke-Yarrow said, was based on her success in finding neighbors and other children to fill her social and emotional needs. A 1983 report by a research team headed by Dr. Radke-Yarrow found, however, that deep depression could strike even very young children. The study, of 9-year-olds in New Zealand, indicated that, based on adult criteria, about 10 percent of the children had already suffered depression, including children as young as 5. Marian Radke was born in Horicon, Wis., on March 2 1918. She graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1939 and received a doctorate in psychology from the University of Minnesota in 1944. Dr. Radke married Leon J. Yarrow, a psychologist at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, in 1949; he died in 1982. Besides her son, Andrew, also of Bethesda, Dr. Radke-Yarrow is survived by one grandson. Before her career at the National Institute of Mental Health, Dr. Radke-Yarrow taught psychology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Queens College and the University of Denver. Among her other books are "Child Rearing: Inquiry Into Research and Methods," with John D. Campbell and Roger V. Burton (Jossey-Bass, 1968); "Development of Antisocial and Prosocial Behavior" (Academic Press, 1986); and "Children of Depressed Mothers" (Cambridge University Press, 1998). For 10 years in the 1980s, Dr. Yarrow and Carolyn Zahn-Waxler, a colleague at the National Institute of Mental Health, charted indications of altruism in more than 300 children. They found that as early as 12 months old, some children displayed helpful behavior like touching, patting or offering some other sympathetic gesture to an adult or another child who seemed to be in distress. "This is not happenstance," Dr. Radke-Yarrow told The New York Times in 1981. "These modes of behavior patterning begin from very early on" Ben Weisman, 85, Composer for Presley LOS ANGELES, May 22 (AP) - Ben Weisman, a classically trained pianist who helped write nearly 60 songs for Elvis Presley, including many for his movies, died here on Sunday. He was 85. His death was announced by Barbara Gleicher, the wife of Mr. Weisman's nephew. She said he had Alzheimer's disease and suffered a stroke last month. Mr. Weisman, whom Presley called "the mad professor", was composer or co-composer of a string of hits for the singer, including "Follow That Dream" and "Fame and Fortune." Other songs included "Wooden Heart" for the movie "G.I.Blues," "Rock-a-Hula Baby" for "Blue Hawaii" and "Crawfish" for "King Creole." He also wrote for other stars, including Barbra Streisand, Johnny Mathis, Bobby Vee and the Beatles. Mr. Weisman was born in Nov. 16, 1921, in Providence, R.I., and was raised in Brooklyn. He studied classical piano as a teenager and at the Juilliard School of Music. He began writing for Presley in 1956. [[image]] George Adams Gallery "A Slow Time in Arcadia," a 1977 acrylic by Roy De Forest. Roy De Forest, 77, Painter Of Colorful, Comic Scenes By ROBERTA SMITH Roy De Forest, a Bay Area artist whose paintings depicted a comical, crowded frontier land of people and animals in patchworks of scorched, textured color, died on Friday in Vallejo, Calif. He was 77 and lived in nearby Port Costa. His death was confirmed by George Adams, his New York dealer, who said the cause had not been determined. Mr. De Forest belonged to a group of Bay Area individualists who included Robert Arneson, Joan Brown, William T. Wiley and Peter Saul. They were often grouped under the heading of Funk, a term Mr. De Forest disliked; the New York art world tended to lump them together as regionalists. Most were versed in Abstract Expressionism but gradually turned its formal lessons to narrative, nonabstract ends. Mr. De Forest's abstractions morphed into crusty maplike expanses teeming with odd textures, cartoon details, little folk-art silhouettes and swarming dots. He was a lover of dogs, rarely owning fewer than two. By the mid-1960s he had developed a sardonic Americana of guys and dogs, overlapping with other animals, birds and sometimes imaginary beings in flattened landscapes, whose hallucinatory colors and a down-home woodsiness presaged the nascent counterculture. The dots developed into coarse pointillism, becoming something of a trademark; the little dollops of paint resembled chocolate chips (or for some, LSD tabs). The son of migrant farm workers, Mr. De Forest was born in North Platte, Neb., in 1930 and grew up mostly in Yakima, Wash., where he attended junior college. He studied on a scholarship at the San Francisco Art Institute, where his teachers included the prominent local artists Hassel Smith, Elmer Bischoff and David Park, and later earned bachelor's and master's degrees from San Francisco State College. He taught at Counterculture folk art, populated by beasts and humans. the university of California, Davis, from 1965 to 1992. He is survived by his wife, Gloria; a daughter, Oriana, and a son, Pascal, both of Concord, Calif.; and three sisters, also of California: Beth Jacobs of San Leandro, Beverly Lagiss of Livermore and Lynn Robie of Sacramento. His first solo show was at the East & West Gallery in San Francisco in 1955. Starting in 1966, he exhibited regularly at the Allan Frumkin Gallery in New York. A retrospective organized by San Francisco Museum of Modern Art came to the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1975. In that show's catalog, Mr. De Forest identified himself as an "obscure visual constructor of mechanical delights" and quoted a talking dog, named Samuel Johnson, who said, "What is current taste but old desires made palatable by present boredom."
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