Lealon E. Martin, a pioneer in health communication for the Public Health Service and the National Institutes of Health, died December 5 in Greensboro, North Carolina, of complications following a fall. He was 86 and had been a member of NASW since 1957.
Martin was born in Natchez, Mississippi, and graduated from Millsaps College in Jackson. He was a high-school teacher, assistant editor of the Jackson State Tribune, and an education advisor for the Civilian Conservation Corps. He also was photo editor of the Associated Press in Atlanta for a year.
For five years embracing World War II, he developed the VD education program for the Public Health Service and supervised its film production in California. In Washington, he was assistant chief of the Heart Information Center {HIC) of the National Heart Institute 1948-56; assistant chief, NIH Office of Research Information, 1956-60; then back to the Heart Institute as HIC chief, 1960-66; then director of the Office of Communications at the National Institute of Mental Health until his retirement in 1973. He published two books, numerous articles on health, and many short stories.
Martin is survived by his wife, Lucile, of Greensboro and two daughters, two grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.-Odom Fanning.
Col. Mitchell R. Sharpe, Jr., a long-time member of the National Association of Science Writers, died January 6, 1997 in Huntsville, Alabama. He was 72.
Best known for co-authoring "The Rocket Team," a highly regarded history of modern rocketry and space exploration, he was the author of more than 140 articles, manuals, papers, and books. He twice received the Robert H. Goddard Essay Award (1969 and 1975) and in 1973 received the Gold Medal Tsiolkovsky Historical Writing Award from Kaluga, USSR. He was a graduate of Alabama Polytechnic Institute (now Auburn University) and a veteran of both WWII and Korea.
Sharpe is survived by his former wife, Virginia L. Sharpe; three children and two grandchildren.
Memorial gifts can be made in his name to the U.S. Space and Rocket Center Museum Enhancement Fund, 1 Tranquility Base, Huntsville, AL 35807.-C. Blake Powers
Milton Silverman, a former science editor of The San Francisco Chronicle who was also a prolific author, drug researcher, and longtime investigator of the international pharmaceutical industry, died January 18 at his home in Woodside, CA, after a long illness. He was 86.
Originally headed for a career in medicine, Silverman began writing on science for The Chronicle while a graduate student at Stanford in 1934, and received his Ph.D. in pharmacology from the University of California at San Francisco two years later. He became a member of the National Association of Science Writers in 1948 and was named president for 1956-1957.
He remained at The Chronicle until a heart attack forced him to resign in 1959, but he continued writing and lecturing until a few years ago. The winner of many journalism awards, Silverman gained international renown along with Ralph Chaney, the late University of California paleontologist, for an adventurous expedition they led in 1948 to one of the most remote parts of China's Sichuan province, where they discovered a family of trees long thought to be extinct.
The trees are now known as the "dawn redwoods," because they are the genetic ancestors of today's California redwoods. Chaney and Silverman brought back thousands of seedlings which have been planted in the UC campus in Berkeley, in Golden Gate Park, and as far away as Alaska.
In 1966, Silverman was recruited as a special assistant to Dr. Philip R. Lee, then assistant secretary of health in the Lyndon Johnson administration, to investigate prescription drug costs under the Medicare program and later, at UC San Francisco, to work on a series of books that indicted the international marketing practices of many major pharmaceutical companies. He also reported on the discovery of penicillin and other antibiotics, which resulted in an award-winning book titled Magic in a Bottle.
-Excerpted from the January 21, 1997 issue of the San Francisco Chronicle. Copyright 1997 Chronicle Publ. Co.