Alton L. Blakeslee, one of the nation's most honored and widely read science and medical reporters during three decades as chief science writer of The Associated Press, has died. He was 83.
Blakeslee died Sunday night at North Shore University Hospital on Long Island after a yearlong battle with cancer, said his wife, Virginia. Blakeslee was the middle generation in a family line of science reporters. His Pulitzer Prize-winning father, Howard, was the AP's first science editor; his daughter, Sandra Blakeslee, is a regular contributor to The New York Times.
Mrs. Blakeslee said her husband often joked that he "was Howard Blakeslee's son and Sandra Blakeslee's father. He was never himself." Blakeslee joined the AP in 1939 and took over the science desk in New York when his father died in 1952. He formally received the title of science editor in 1969, to coordinate an expanded science staff.
His first major assignment on the science beat was as AP's correspondent with the 4 1/2-month Antarctic expedition of Adm. Richard E. Byrd in 1946. He called it "an absorbing experience not to be missed--nor repeated too often."
Around that time he began producing a weekly March of Science column for Sunday newspapers. The column received a George Polk Memorial Award in 1951.
From microbiology to moon landings and acupuncture to astrophysics, Blakeslee covered the world's major science events and translated the technicalities and complexities of scientific research into layman's language.
The latter was a task not only for reporters, but for scientists themselves, Blakeslee said in 1959 as he accepted a medal for outstanding reporting from the American Chemical Society.
"The first error is failing to talk in simple, common language," he said. "Our knowledge does not become a communicated idea if it must push through a briar patch of sticky words."
In later years he served on the usage panels of the American Heritage Dictionary and the Harper Dictionary of Contemporary Usage. He was the author of three books. One of them, "Your Heart has Nine Lives," written in collaboration with Dr. Jeremiah B. Stamler in 1963, was widely circulated in serial form by AP and was awarded one of the three prestigious Lasker prizes Blakeslee received during his career.
His other books were "Polio and the Salk Vaccine" in 1956 and "What You Should Know About Heart Disease" in 1957. Blakeslee was a two-time recipient, in 1963 and 1964, of the American Heart Association's Howard Blakeslee Award, named for his father and given for excellence in writing on heart disease.
Other honors included the Westinghouse-American Association for the Advancement of Science Award in 1952; Sigma Delta Chi distinguished service and deadline awards in 1965 and 1973; an American Dental Association science writing award in 1967 and a National Society for Medical Research award in 1976.
He was president of the National Association of Science Writers in 1954-55.
Blakeslee possessed a core of skepticism that he formalized in 1965 by co-founding the American Tentative Society. Its guiding principle was that today's solemn truth may be tomorrow's laughable folly.
Funded by the estate of another co-founder, AP's San Francisco-based science reporter Rennie Taylor, the society distributed honors, awards and scholarships to recognize innovative achievement and encourage questioning attitudes in young science writers. [The ATS was dissolved a few years ago and its funds turned over to the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing to help support a traveling fellowship program for young science writers.] Blakeslee was born June 27, 1913, in Dallas, but grew up on Long Island. He attended Duke University for two years before finishing his degree at Columbia in 1935.
He worked at the Wilmington (Del.) Journal four years, then joined the AP in 1939 at Baltimore. Transferred to New York in 1942, he handled incoming overseas news through the war years, then was assigned to the AP Newsfeatures Department, working under his father. In a note announcing his retirement in 1978, Blakeslee pointed out that his father had joined AP in 1905, "so Blakeslees have been aboard 73 years (56 percent) of AP's 130 years. ... Time enough."
For the next six years he worked as a science writer for the American Cancer Society.
In addition to his wife, whom he married in 1937, survivors include a son, Dennis, of Madison, Wis., daughter Sandra, of Santa Fe, NM, and three grandchildren.
--Rayner Pike, Associated Press writer
Reprinted with permission of The Associated Press. Copyright 1997. The Associated Press.