IN MEMORIUM

John Barbour

John A. Barbour, a longtime AP NewsFeatures writer who covered the nation’s first manned space expeditions, died on May 8 of complications from a stroke. He was 75.

Barbour was born Dec. 31, 1928, in Ann Arbor, Mich. He spent more than 43 years with The Associated Press, first in Michigan and later at the company’s headquarters, in New York City. He covered some of the nation’s earliest manned space missions, from the flight that made Alan Shepard the first American to enter space in 1961 to the near-disastrous Apollo 13 mission in 1970.

Barbour worked on several AP books and is the author of Footprints on the Moon, a 1969 book chronicling the Apollo 11 space mission. He also wrote In the Wake of the Whale, about the endangered blue whale.

He retired in 1996.

Barbour’s children said he was humble man who made friends and newspaper contacts with equal ease.
“I just remember when he was working in Manhattan, he would go anywhere and the city would just open up and embrace him,” said his son, John Barbour, Jr. “He had a friend on every street, it seemed.”

(Source: The Associated Press)

David Leff

David N. Leff, science editor of BioWorld Today, has died at the age of 85. He had been an NASW member since 1970.

The details of Leff’s life would force most journalists to question their own worth, and a cross-section of his experiences reads like a history book. He was involved in Department of Agriculture relief efforts for migrant workers during the Dust Bowl. He helped launch the first United Nations agency in war-ravaged Europe. He reported, by short-wave radio, the first man to orbit the earth-the Soviet Juri Gagarin. Working as a journalist in Prague, Czech Republic, Leff was first to relay in English the Soviet invasion of Czechoslavakia, again via short-wave radio. He dined under the roof of Ho Chi Minh during the Vietnam War. He traveled to Red China before established relations were made by the U.S. He once climbed a mountain with Fidel Castro.

Born on Sept. 3, 1918, in New York, Leff graduated from Stanford University in 1939 with a degree in journalism. He later took post-graduate courses at the University of California at San Francisco and the National University of Mexico, in Mexico City.

His career path to BioWorld Today began in 1968, when Leff was hired as the Eastern European correspondent for McGraw-Hill World News. In 1972, he moved to the staff of McGraw-Hill’s Medical World News magazine; and, in 1981, he founded McGraw-Hill’s Biotechnology Newswatch, for which he served as editor-in-chief for the rest of that decade. Following that, he was hired to serve as BioWorld Today’s science editor.

At BioWorld, David drew more fan mail than the rest (of the staff) combined. One reader called his articles “works of art,” from his “opening salvo to his concluding mental fireworks.” Another, while lamenting that biotechnology literature is usually “deadly boring,” wrote that he enjoyed David’s stories for their “humorous twist” and “elements of style.” Yet another said David’s ability “to bring the most complex concepts to a layman’s level” was a “godsend.”

David wrote more than 2,300 articles for BioWorld Today. A hard worker and writer his entire life, he filed his last story less than a month before his death.

(Source: BioWorld Today)

Eugene Mallove

Eugene Mallove, 56, was killed in Norwich, Conn. on May 14, apparently during a robbery.

Those of you who go back a ways may remember Gene as a writer for the MIT news office. There he became caught up in the excitement over cold fusion and convinced something was there. He wrote a book heralding cold fusion as a breakthrough and resigned from MIT in protest of their handling of cold fusion. Later he left NASW, I believe for the same reason. Since then he has researched and promoted cold fusion and published Infinite Energy magazine, which is devoted to cold fusion.

Gene was trained in aeronautical and astronautical engineering at MIT, and had a Ph.D. in environmental health sciences from Harvard. Later he turned to science writing. Like many of us who trained in science and engineering, he dreamed of dramatic breakthroughs that would make the world a better place. He became convinced cold fusion was that breakthrough and championed it tirelessly for the past 15 years.

Some of us who knew Gene before he discovered cold fusion sometimes wondered what it was he saw in it. But over the last year or so some signal has emerged from out of the noise that obscured the field. Something seems to be happening that can’t be explained by the standard physics. A pattern is emerging, and theories are being formulated. It may not be the dramatic energy breakthrough Gene had hoped for, but it looks like there may be interesting new physics. Gene was enthusiastic about it. I wish he could have lived to see what will follow.

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(Contributed by Jeff Hecht, Boston correspondent, New Scientist)