Quote:Dr. William P. Murphy Jr., a biomedical engineer who was an inventor of the vinyl blood bag that replaced breakable bottles in the Korean War and made transfusions safe and reliable on battlefields, in hospitals and at scenes of natural disasters and accidents, died on Thursday [Nov 30] at his home in Coral Gables, Fla. He was 100.

His death was confirmed on Monday by Mike Tomás, the president and chief executive of U.S. Stem Cell, a Florida company for which Dr. Murphy had long served as chairman. He became chairman emeritus last year.

Dr. Murphy, the son of a Nobel Prize-winning Boston physician, was also widely credited with early advances in the development of pacemakers to stabilize erratic heart rhythms, of artificial kidneys to cleanse the blood of impurities, and of many sterile devices, including trays, scalpel blades, syringes, catheters and other surgical and patient-care items that are used once and thrown away.

But Dr. Murphy was perhaps best known for his work on the modern blood bag: the sealed, flexible, durable and inexpensive container, made of polyvinyl chloride, that did away with fragile glass bottles and changed almost everything about the storage, portability and ease of delivering and transfusing blood supplies worldwide.

Developed with a colleague, Dr. Carl W. Walter, in 1949-50, the bags are light, wrinkle-resistant and tear proof. They are easy to handle, preserve red blood cells and proteins, and ensure that the blood is not exposed to the air for at least six weeks. Blood banks, hospitals and other medical storage facilities depend on their longevity. Drones drop them safely into remote areas.

In 1952, Dr. Murphy joined the United States Public Health Service as a consultant and, at the behest of the Army, went to Korea during the war there to demonstrate, with teams of medics, the use of the blood bags in transfusing wounded soldiers at aid stations near the front lines.

“It was the first major test of the bags under battlefield conditions, and it was an unqualified success,” Dr. Murphy said in a telephone interview from his home for this obituary in 2019. In time, he noted, the bags became a mainstay of the blood-collection and storage networks of the American Red Cross and similar organizations abroad.



(For years, researchers have said an ingredient in polyvinyl chlorides, diethylhexyl phthalate, or DEHP — used in making building materials, clothing and many health care products — poses a cancer risk to humans. Since 2008, Congress has banned DEHP in children’s products in the U.S.; the European Union has required labels; and alternative chemicals have replaced DEHP in blood bags.)

In 1957, he founded the Medical Development Corporation, a Miami company that two years later became Cordis Corporation, a developer and maker of devices for diagnosing and treating heart and vascular diseases. With Dr. Murphy as chief engineer, president, chief executive and chairman, Cordis produced what he called the first synchronous cardiac pacemaker.

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Dr. Murphy retired from Cordis in 1985 to pursue other commercial medical interests. By then, he held 17 patents, had written some 30 articles for professional journals and had received the Distinguished Service Award of the North American Society of Pacing and Electrophysiology. He received the Lemelson-MIT Lifetime Achievement Award in 2003 and was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2008.

William Parry Murphy Jr. was born on Nov. 11, 1923, in Boston. His father, a hematologist, shared the 1934 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for a study that showed that a diet of raw liver could ameliorate the effects of pernicious anemia. His mother, Harriett (Adams) Murphy, was the first woman to become a licensed dentist in Massachusetts.

William Jr. and his older sister, Priscilla, grew up in Brookline, the Boston suburb. As a teenager Priscilla became the youngest qualified female pilot in the country but died shortly afterward in the crash of a small plane in a snowstorm near Syracuse, N.Y., on a nighttime medical-mercy flight from Boston.

Fascinated as a boy with mechanics, William devised a gasoline-powered snow blower, whose design he sold to a company.

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After retiring from Cordis, Dr. Murphy and a colleague, John Sterner, in 1986 bought Hyperion Inc., which designed, manufactured and marketed medical laboratory and diagnostic devices. In 2003, he joined the board of Bioheart, which developed stem cell therapies. He became chairman of Bioheart in 2010 and later chairman of U.S. Stem Cell, a successor company.

In 2019, a federal court empowered the Food and Drug Administration to stop U.S. Stem Cell from injecting patients with an extract made from their own belly fat. The action came after three patients suffered severe, permanent eye damage resulting from fat extracts injected into their eyes to treat macular degeneration. The company had maintained that the extract contained stem cells with healing and regenerative powers, but medical experts disputed that claim.

Dr. Murphy had by then become enthusiastic about the promise of stem cell research. In 2014, he spoke to a Miami conference about the rapidly growing and controversial field of using stem cells derived from bone marrow and umbilical cord blood to treat neurodegenerative conditions, diabetes and heart disease. “That’s a whole new world of regenerative therapy that’s going to be critical to our future,” he said.

NY Times

Quote:Lear died on Tuesday at his home in Los Angeles, according to the New York Times.

Norman Milton Lear was born on July 27th, 1922 in New Haven, Connecticut. He enlisted in the Army in 1942, where he served in the Mediterranean theater as a radio operator. Lear flew 52 combat missions during World War II and was awarded the Air Medal with four oak leaf clusters before being discharged in 1945.

Following his military career, Lear moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career in public relations. Along with aspiring comedy writer Ed Simmons, he began writing comedy sketches for the likes of Martin and Lewis and Rowan and Martin. In the 1950s, he worked on programs including Honestly, Celeste!, The Martha Raye Show, and The Tennessee Ernie Ford Show before creating his first television show, The Deputy, in 1959.

Lear briefly switched to film — he wrote and produced the 1967 film Divorce American Style and directed the 1971 film Cold Turkey, both starring Dick Van Dyke — in the 1960s before he really struck gold with television. He pitched several shows under various names about a working class family before CBS finally picked up All in the Family, which premiered in 1971. Through their on-screen disagreements, the politically divided Bunker family broke ground in its portrayals and discussions of racism, feminism, and war.

In 1972, Sanford and Son, another Lear project, premiered on NBC. Touted as the African American answer to All in the Family, the show was one of the first Black sitcoms and ran until 1977. Lear helmed a number of other popular sitcoms throughout the 1970s, including Maude, The Jeffersons, One Day at a Time, and Good Times. All of his projects helped shaped the structural and thematic building blocks of the genre, from its live studio audience and multi-camera taping to its storylines that dealt with modern societal issues.

Lear’s politics didn’t just show up in his writing. In the 1980s, he founded People for the American Way, a progressive advocacy group meant to counteract the work of the far-right. He produced a television special called I Love Liberty in 1982 as a response to the Moral Majority. In 2001, he purchased one of the first published copies of the United States Declaration of Independence for $8.1 million and organized a so-called “tour” of the document so that Americans could see it in real life. The Declaration visited numerous presidential libraries and museums in the early 2000s, and even appeared at the 2002 Olympics and Super Bowl. Along with Rob Reiner, Lear produced a dramatized reading of the document on July 4th, 2001 that was turned into a film.

Lear won a number of awards in his career, including the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Divorce American Style and several Emmy Awards for All in the Family. In 1991, President Bill Clinton awarded him the National Medal of Arts, and in 2017, he was awarded the fourth annual Woody Guthrie Prize and the Kennedy Center Honors. He was inducted into the Television Academy Hall of Fame in 1984.



CONSEQUENCE TV

Quote:Bert I. Gordon, the professed king of the monster movies whose B pictures featured giant rats, giant spiders, giant grasshoppers, giant chickens, a colossal man and 30-foot teenagers laying waste to everything in sight, died on Wednesday in Los Angeles. He was 100.

His daughter Patricia Gordon confirmed the death.

As anxieties over nuclear testing and the effects of radiation swept postwar America, Mr. Gordon embarked on a low-budget filmmaking odyssey that turned mutated monsters loose on the hapless world. Despite the fact that his movies featured stars like Ida Lupino and Orson Welles, and despite the eye-catching apocalyptic titles and lurid posters, he generated many flops, a few minor hits and largely negative reviews. He also generated a cult following.

In the 1950s and early ’60s, his monster movies were perfect for drive-in theaters, where audiences took in wildly improbable plots, silly dialogue and crude special effects: locusts overrunning a miniature city, a gigantic rat hovering over a girl in a negligee, Ms. Lupino being eaten by vast mealworms.

Filming a movie in 10 to 15 days, using rear-projection enlargements of creatures with ordinary people in the foreground, Mr. Gordon produced, directed and often wrote about 25 films over six decades starting in 1955, most of them monster movies. Among his best known were “The Cyclops” (1957), “Village of the Giants” (1965), “Necromancy” (1972), “The Food of the Gods” (1976) and “Empire of the Ants” (1977).

None came close to the quality or popularity of the classic atomic-monster films of the era: “The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms” (1953), directed by Eugène Lourié, about a dinosaur freed from Arctic hibernation by a nuclear test and slain amid crowds at Coney Island, and “Them” (1954), directed by Gordon Douglas, about huge radioactive ants that menace Los Angeles and are trapped and firebombed in the city’s water tunnels.



Elements of the beach-party genre were combined with Mr. Gordon’s usual themes in “Village of the Giants” (1965). A substance called “goo,” produced with a boy’s chemistry set, causes gigantism in a gang of rocking teenagers, who become 30-foot delinquents running amok in a California town. More chemistry-set magic produces an antidote, and all returns to normal. The Los Angeles Times’s reviewer liked the special effects and the “endless views of healthy young torsos gyrating to the rhythms.”

Orson Welles, often desperate for money to finance his own films, starred in Mr. Gordon’s “Necromancy,” about a sinister man who wields mystical powers over a small town with rituals seeking to bring back the dead.

Ms. Lupino appeared in “The Food of the Gods,” one of three Gordon films loosely based on H.G. Wells tales, which portrayed people on an island fighting overgrown rats, wasps and chickens that have lapped up radioactive stuff that looks like pancake batter oozing from the ground. Vincent Canby of The New York Times called the film “stunningly ridiculous.”

Bert Ira Gordon was born in Kenosha, Wis., on Sept. 24, 1922, the son of Charles Abraham Gordon and Sadeline (Barnett) Gordon. He became interested in film as a boy, when an aunt gave him a 16-millimeter movie camera for his birthday. He attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison but dropped out to join the Army Air Forces during World War II.

In addition to his daughter Patricia, he is survived by his wife; their daughter, Christina Gordon; another daughter, Carol Gordon; six grandchildren; and 19 great-grandchildren. He died in a hospital after collapsing at his home in Beverly Hills, Calif.

Mr. Gordon was a production assistant on the CBS television series “Racket Squad” in the early 1950s, and in 1954 he was the producer, cinematographer and supervising editor for the adventure series “Serpent Island.”

After 25 years of mostly making monster pictures, Mr. Gordon produced “Burned at the Stake” (1982), about the Salem witch trials; two sex comedies, “Let’s Do It!” (1982) and “The Big Bet” (1985); “Satan’s Princess” (1989), about a missing woman; and “Secrets of a Psychopath” (2015), about a murderous brother and sister.

Called “Mr. B.I.G.,” both for his initials and for his techniques of creating movie monsters, Mr. Gordon wrote “The Amazing Colossal Worlds of Mr. B.I.G.: An Autobiographical Journey,” which was published in 2010.

NY Times

Quote:Frank Field, who as a meteorologist brought a groundbreaking credential to his job as a television weather forecaster in New York, and who also had a long career presenting network programs on science and medicine, died on Saturday in Florida. He was 100.

His death was announced by WNBC-TV in New York, where Dr. Field began his broadcast career in 1958.

Dr. Field, a presence on New York and network television for more than 40 years, was not the city’s first popular TV forecaster. But he was different from his predecessors in one significant way.

“Weather forecasting used to be in a class with reporting real estate transactions for the newspaper,” Dr. Field told The New Yorker for a 1966 profile. “The networks figured it had to be all jazzed up with pretty girls and other gimmicks.”

Bespectacled and “rather professorial in manner,” as he was described in the magazine profile, Dr. Field more than made up for his lack of flash.

Although he did not have a college degree in meteorology — his doctorate was in optometry, a profession he pursued for a time before embarking on a career in television — Dr. Field had been a weather forecaster in the military, a credential that earned him recognition as a meteorologist by the American Meteorological Society. He was a recipient of the society’s Seal of Approval, which recognizes on-air forecasters who provide “sound delivery of weather information to the general public.”

He drew on his technical knowledge to interpret data from weather satellites launched in the emerging space age, and to explain the details of the illustrated weather systems he displayed on television.

He also established himself as a science reporter who covered more than just the weather.

Dr. Field narrated live telecasts of cardiac surgery and organ transplants. He was an advocate for fire-safety programs, describing the best ways to escape a building fire in the book “Dr. Frank Field’s Get Out Alive” (1992) and in an educational DVD for children and their parents, “Fire Is … ” (2006). He also hosted the programs “Medical Update” and “Health Field.”

Perhaps most famously, he publicized the Heimlich maneuver, the lifesaving procedure developed by Dr. Henry J. Heimlich in the 1970s that employs a bear hug and abdominal thrusts to clear food lodged in the throat. Dr. Field brought Dr. Heimlich to his studio for a demonstration.

Franklyn Field was born on March 30, 1923, in Queens, a son of immigrants from Ukraine. His father was a factory worker.

He was studying geology at Brooklyn College and playing center on the school’s football team — the quarterback was Allie Sherman, who would later be the head coach of the New York Giants — when he enlisted in the Army Air Forces in World War II and was commissioned as a lieutenant.
After the military trained him as a meteorology specialist, he flew over German-occupied France to analyze weather patterns that would affect American bombing runs. He later lectured on meteorology at stateside air bases.

He did not return to Brooklyn College after the war, instead continuing his work in meteorology. He joined the staff of the United States Weather Bureau in Manhattan and headed companies that provided weather data to newspapers and private clients.

Dr. Field left NBC in 1984 and moved to CBS, where he worked for 11 years. He later had stints at two local television stations in New York, WNYW and WWOR. He retired in 2004.

Dr. Field was also as the senior figure of a TV weathercasting family. His son, Storm (born Elliott David Field), began delivering weather reports on WABC in New York in 1976 and went on to have a long career there and on WCBS (where father and son briefly worked together) and WWOR. Dr. Field’s daughter Allison Field was also a weather forecaster, at WCBS, in addition to pursuing an acting career.

They survive him, as does another daughter, Pamela Field; seven grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren. Dr. Field’s wife, Joan Kaplan Field, died this year. Dr. Field lived in Boca Raton, Fla.

Despite (or perhaps because of) his serious demeanor, Dr. Field became a presence on late-night television.

After Johnny Carson poked fun at him on “The Tonight Show,” Dr. Field (whom Carson jokingly called NBC’s “crack meteorologist”) became an occasional guest on the show.

One night during a rainy spell in New York, Carson and his “Tonight Show” colleagues poured buckets of water on him.

NY Times

Quote:Hazel McCallion, who as the longest-serving mayor in Canadian history transformed the sleepy Toronto suburb of Mississauga into a multicultural dynamo and the country’s sixth-largest city, died at her home there on Jan. 29, nine years after she ended her 36-year run. She was 101.

Doug Ford, the premier of Ontario and a close friend of Mrs. McCallion’s, said she died from pancreatic cancer.

And while Mississauga in the 1970s was overwhelmingly white, the city is now one of Canada’s most diverse, drawing immigrants from East and South Asia.
Mrs. McCallion did not just survive but thrive through 12 terms by blending thrifty pragmatism with open-armed populism.

Though she leaned slightly to the political left, she did not hew to a party platform or ideology. Her singular goal was to bring prosperity to Mississauga, which she did by keeping budgets trim — the city rarely carried debt or raised property taxes — and being unafraid to assert her city’s interests against its neighbors or in the Ontario provincial government

“Hazel McCallion does not caution,” the magazine Toronto Life wrote in 2003. “She berates. She harangues. She, well, bites off people’s heads.”

But if politicians and bureaucrats feared her, voters loved her.

After she decided not to run for re-election in 2014, she picked her successor, Bonnie Crombie, who won handily. No one was surprised: Mrs. McCallion left office with an 85 percent approval rating. They called her Hurricane Hazel, a tribute to her brash style more than a reference to the weather disaster that killed 80 people in Toronto in 1954.

Her reputation was cemented just months after she took office, when a train carrying tons of toxic and flammable chemicals overturned near the middle of Mississauga. She immediately ordered most of the town, some 220,000 residents, to evacuate. Over several days she was there alongside the police and firefighters, ushering people to safety, undeterred by an ankle sprained along the way.

And when it was over, she was fierce in her demand for damages.

“It will be an astronomical sum,” she told reporters, “and somebody is going to get the bill.”

Mrs. McCallion played professional hockey in the 1930s, and she remained the picture of ruddy health through her time as mayor, a fact that endeared her to voters. Even into her 80s, she carried a hockey stick in her car trunk, in case she came across a game. She fished, hiked and once, when she was 87, biked five miles to work to promote alternatives to driving.

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Hazel Journeaux was born on Feb. 14, 1921, in Port-Daniel, a small town on the Gaspé Peninsula in southeast Quebec. Her father, Herbert, ran a fishing and processing company, and her mother, Amanda (Travers) Journeaux, was a nurse.
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“Having time on my hands is not acceptable,” she told The Toronto Star in 2001, when she was 80. “If I quit, I’d have to find something very challenging to do. And what could be more challenging than being mayor?”

After she finally did end her run as mayor in 2014, at 93, she continued to work. She served as the first chancellor of the Hazel McCallion Campus of Sheridan College, a Toronto-area technical school; she advised Mr. Ford, the Ontario premier; and she oversaw the Greater Toronto Airport Authority, a job that in 2019 took her on a tour of the world’s busiest airports.

In a 2022 interview with the newspaper The National Post, she summed up her philosophy by recalling something her mother would ask her when she was young: “What do you want to accomplish in life? Do you want to be a follower or do you want to take advantage of opportunities to be a leader?”

NY Times

Quote:Is 100 the New 80?: Centenarians Are Becoming More Common by Katharina Buchholz, Feb 5, 2021

Living a long life is a common wish of many – and some might just get what they wish for. Life expectancies in developed and developing countries alike have been rising continuously, causing the number of people who live to 100 years to rise also.

This year, the United Nations expect the number of centenarians to rise to approximately 573,000 worldwide.

The U.S. has the highest absolute number of centenarians in the world with 97,000 living in the country. Japan comes second with 79,000 Japanese who are 100 years or older, according to World Atlas.  Japan is also where the world’s oldest person lives. Kane Tanaka from the Fukuoka prefecture is 117 years old, making her a so-called supercentenarian, which is a person living to or beyond the age of 110.

The world's oldest man, Saturnino de la Fuente of Spain, is turning 112 years old on Monday. He also hails from a country with a higher-than-average population of centenarian. In France, Spain and Italy, the share of the population who is over the age of 100 stands at around 0.03 percent - the highest in Europe.

Japan is the country with the highest rate of centenarians, at 6 for every 10,000 people or approximately 0.06 percent. Uruguay, Hong Kong and Puerto Rico are also home to some of the highest levels of centenarians compared to population with rates between 0.06 and 0.045 percent.

Quote:Screenwriter Norma Barzman, who got her start during the Golden Age of Hollywood and was blacklisted with her husband during the McCarthy era, died Sunday in Beverly Hills, her son Paolo confirmed. She was 103.

Barzman and her husband, fellow screenwriter Ben Barzman, moved to Europe as did many other Hollywood progressives who came under McCarthy’s scrutiny. The couple and their seven children lived in London, Paris and Mougins, France between 1949 and 1976. Ben Barzman died in 1989.

Norma Barzman was also active in getting credits restored for blacklisted writers whose films were released with a “front” name, such as her film “The Locket.” In 1999, her writing credit was restored on the 1953 film “Luxury Girls,” which had carried the name of the front Ennio Flaiano.

Barzman spoke out in protest when Elia Kazan, who was a witness before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, was given an honorary Oscar in 1998, and was instrumental in helping to organize an exhibit on the Hollywood Blacklist at the Academy in 2001.

She authored “The Red and the Blacklist: The Intimate Memoir of a Hollywood Expatriate,” which was released in 2003 and documents her experience as a blacklisted writer.

She recounted her experiences in the L.A. Times in 2014. “But even in Europe, the U.S government kept these exiles at close range,” Susan King wrote. “After obtaining her FBI files, Norma Barzman ‘discovered they followed us in Paris. We moved around a lot, and they knew every telephone number and every address. They knew everything we did from 1949 to 1954 until we bought our house in Paris.’ And to complicate matters, the U.S. Embassy took away her passport in 1951 for seven years.”

Barzman also wrote the story “What Nancy Wanted,” which Sheridan Gibney adapted into the script for the 1946 psychological thriller “The Locket.” She was given a co-writing credit years later. The film stars Laraine Day as Nancy, a woman who is about to be married when another man visits her fiancé, claiming to be her former husband and alleging that she is mentally disturbed. The film is known for its use of flashbacks.

Among her other credits were the script for the 1946 Warner Bros. romantic comedy “Never Say Goodbye,” starring Errol Flynn and Eleanor Parker as a divorced couple whose daughter tries to bring them back together.

Barzman wrote the 1953 French-Italian comedy film “Finishing School” and later penned the Italian television series “Il triangolo rosso,” which ran from 1967-1969. She made on screen appearances as an actress in “Theatre 70” (1970) and “Pajama Party” (2000).

Barzman was born on Sept. 15, 1920 in New York City. She was briefly married to mathematician Claude Shannon; they lived together in Princeton, N.J. before divorcing. She then relocated to Los Angeles alongside her mother and took classes at The School for Writers, which had leftist members.

Barzman is survived by seven children, including her son Paolo Barzman, who is a film and television director-writer.