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Peter de Vries, Dutch Crime Reporter, Dies After Being Shot

Peter de Vries, Dutch Crime Reporter, Dies After Being Shot

AMSTERDAM — A Dutch crime reporter who was shot in the head in a brazen attack in central Amsterdam last week as he was leaving a television studio, died of his wounds on Thursday, his family said in a statement. The reporter, Peter R. de Vries, was 64.

“Peter has fought until the end, but has been unable to win this battle,” the statement, carried by the Dutch broadcast news service RTL Nieuws, said. “We are indescribably proud of him and at the same time inconsolable.”

Mr. de Vries, a well-known public figure in the Netherlands, was shot on the evening of July 6 by an unknown assailant. The attack led to broad condemnation in the country, where drug related crime and shootings have steadily increased over the last decade. European leaders have condemned the shooting, which raised questions about protections for journalists.

The police arrested two men last week in connection with the attack after stopping them in a car on a nearby highway. The police identified the suspects as a 35-year-old Polish citizen and a 21-year-old from Rotterdam. The police have said they believe the younger man was the gunman

Both suspects appeared in court in Amsterdam on Friday and they remain in custody.

Ferd Grapperhaus, the Dutch justice minister, called Mr. de Vries a “brave man” and said his death was “nothing less than a direct attack on our society.”

Mr. de Vries, who had hosted a televised crime show for nearly two decades and has long been known in the Netherlands for solving cold cases, had said he regularly received death threats.

The television show on which Mr. de Vries appeared before he was shot last week did not air last Friday, after threats from criminals who said they wanted to target the studio using automatic weapons or a rocket launcher, according to Dutch news media. The show has resumed its daily episodes, but will be recorded elsewhere, the network reported.

Mr. de Vries began his journalism career in 1978 at De Telegraaf, a popular Dutch newspaper. A decade later, he published a book on the kidnapping of the beer magnate Freddy Heineken. He covered many high-profile cases, including the 2005 disappearance of an Alabama teenager, Natalee Holloway, in Aruba, a Caribbean island that is part of the Netherlands; and a decades-long investigation into the rape and murder of an 11-year-old boy, Nicky Verstappen.

His television show, “Peter R. de Vries, Crime Reporter,” which began in 1995 and aired for 17 years, was his real breakthrough.

Most recently, Mr. de Vries had set up a foundation in the hopes of solving the 1993 disappearance of Tanja Groen, a young woman who vanished on her way home from a party. On Tuesday, Dutch public television aired a special program where viewers donated hundreds of thousands of euros to the cause.

Mr. de Vries, who was also the director of a law office, had been an adviser over the past year to a key witness in a trial over killings said to have been ordered by a criminal organization. The main defendant in the case, Ridouan Taghi, who is accused of leading the organization, was arrested in Dubai in 2019.

Derk Wiersum, a lawyer for the same key witness in that trial, was killed in Amsterdam in 2019. The witness’s brother was shot dead in 2018.

Amsterdam and other Dutch cities have been the scene of several shootings over the past decade in which criminals have targeted either each other or those interfering in their crimes. The nearby port of Rotterdam is one of the key gateways for importing cocaine into Europe, and the country is a leader in the illegal production of amphetamines and crystal meth.

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Entertainment

William Smith, Motion Star Recognized for His Onscreen Brawls, Dies at 88

William Smith, Action Star Known for His Onscreen Brawls, Dies at 88

William Smith, an actor known for his portrayals of villains and his onscreen movie brawls, died on Monday in Woodland Hills, Calif. He was 88.

Mr. Smith’s wife, Joanne Cervelli Smith, said he died at the Motion Picture and Television Fund’s Country House and Hospital. She did not specify the cause.

While Mr. Smith was best known for his roles in action movies like “Any Which Way You Can” (1980), and television shows including “Laredo,” “Rich Man, Poor Man” and “Hawaii Five-O,” the real action came from his offscreen life.

He was a polyglot, a bodybuilder, a champion discus thrower and an Air Force pilot during the Korean War, according to his website.

Mr. Smith had more than 300 acting credits listed on IMDb from 1954 to 2020. He did many of his own stunts, and sometimes those scenes got heated. He was throwing punches with Rod Taylor for the 1970 film “Darker Than Amber” when the two began fighting each other for real. Both walked away with broken bones.

“Now that was a good fight,” Mr. Smith recalled in a 2010 interview with BZ Film.

The Columbia, Mo., native solidified his Hollywood status after tussling onscreen with actors like Clint Eastwood, Nick Nolte and Yul Brynner. In the 1980s, the 6-foot-2 actor earned roles in Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Outsiders,” (1983) and in “Conan the Barbarian” (1982), for which he was cast as the father of Conan, who was played by Arnold Schwarzenegger.

His last role was in “Irresistible,” a 2020 film directed by Jon Stewart.

In “Rich Man, Poor Man,” he played the dangerous and eccentric character Anthony Falconetti, which he would later reprise in a follow-up to the series, “Rich Man, Poor Man Book II.”

Mr. Smith, who was born on March 24, 1933, grew up on a cattle ranch in Missouri owned by his parents, William Emmett Smith and Emily Richards Smith. At the ranch, he would develop a love and admiration for horses and the classic Western lifestyle, according to his website.

His family later moved to Southern California, and Mr. Smith immediately began to seek work in films, finding jobs as a child performer and later as a studio extra.

Ms. Smith said in a phone interview on Sunday that besides the tough guy roles that made her husband a star onscreen, he had a compassionate side as well. “He’s definitely tough as nails but he had the heart of a poet,” she said.

In 2009, Mr. Smith published a book of poetry, “The Poetic Works of William Smith.”

The place to find Mr. Smith, even as an older man, was the gym, Ms. Smith said. Young actors often would talk to him between workout sets, and he would share advice, sometimes inviting them to his home to discuss upcoming auditions.

In addition to his wife, Mr. Smith is survived by his son, William E. Smith III, and his daughter, Sherri Anne Cervelli.

Alyssa Lukpat contributed reporting.

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Entertainment

Peter Zinovieff, Composer and Synthesizer Innovator, Dies at 88

Peter Zinovieff, Composer and Synthesizer Innovator, Dies at 88

Peter Zinovieff, a composer and inventor whose pioneering synthesizers shaped albums by Pink Floyd, David Bowie, Roxy Music and Kraftwerk, died on June 23 in Cambridge, England. He was 88.

His death was announced on Twitter by his daughter Sofka Zinovieff, who said he had been hospitalized after a fall.

Mr. Zinovieff oversaw the design of the first commercially produced British synthesizers. In 1969, his company, EMS (Electronic Music Studios), introduced the VCS3 (for “voltage controlled studio”), one of the earliest and most affordable portable synthesizers. Instruments from EMS soon became a staple of 1970s progressive-rock, particularly from Britain and Germany. The company’s slogan was “Think of a sound — now make it.”

Peter Zinovieff was born on Jan. 26, 1933, in London, the son of émigré Russian aristocrats: a princess, Sofka Dolgorouky, and Leo Zinovieff. His parents divorced in 1937.

Peter’s grandmother started teaching him piano when he was in primary school. He attended Oxford University, where he played in experimental music groups while earning a Ph.D. in geology. He also dabbled in electronics.

“I had this facility of putting pieces of wire together to make something that either received or made sounds,” he told Red Bull Music Academy in 2015.

He married Victoria Heber-Percy, then 17, who came from a wealthy family. She and her parents were unhappy with the extensive travel that a geologist’s career required. After Mr. Zinovieff worked briefly for the Air Ministry in London as a mathematician, he turned to making electronic music full time, supported by his wife.

He bought tape recorders and microphones and found high-quality oscillators, filters and signal analyzers at military-surplus stores. Daphne Oram, the electronic-music composer who was a co-founder of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, taught him techniques of making music by splicing together bits of sound recorded on magnetic tape in the era of musique concrète.

But Mr. Zinovieff decided that cutting tape was tedious. He built a primitive sequencer — a device to trigger a set of notes repeatedly — from telephone-switching hardware, and he began working on electronic sequencers with the electrical engineers Mark Dowson and David Cockerell. They realized that early digital computers, which were already used to control factory processes, might also control sound processing.

Mr. Zinovieff’s wife sold her pearl and turquoise wedding tiara for 4,000 British pounds — now about $96,000 — to finance Mr. Zinovieff’s purchase of a PDP-8 computer designed by the Digital Equipment Corporation. Living in Putney, a district of London, Mr. Zinovieff installed it in his garden shed, and he often cited it as the world’s first home computer. He added a second PDP-8; the two units, which he named Sofka and Leo, could control hundreds of oscillators and other sound modules.

The shed was now an electronic-music studio. Mr. Cockerell was an essential partner; he was able to build the devices that Mr. Zinovieff envisioned. Mr. Cockerell “would be able to interpret it into a concrete electronic idea and make the bloody thing — and it worked,” Mr. Zinovieff said in the 2006 documentary “What the Future Sounded Like.”

In 1966, Mr. Zinovieff formed the short-lived Unit Delta Plus with Delia Derbyshire (who created the electronic arrangement of Ron Grainer’s theme for the BBC science fiction institution “Doctor Who”) and Brian Hodgson to make electronic ad jingles and other projects.

The programmer Peter Grogono, working with Mr. Cockerell and Mr. Zinovieff, devised software to perform digital audio analysis and manipulation, presaging modern sampling. It used numbers to control sounds in ways that anticipated the Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) standard that was introduced in 1983.

On Jan. 15, 1968, Mr. Zinovieff brought his computer to Queen Elizabeth Hall in London for Britain’s first public concert of all-electronic music. His “Partita for Unattended Computer” received some skeptical reviews: The Financial Times recognized a technical achievement but called it “the dreariest kind of neo-Webern, drawn out to inordinate length.”

Mr. Zinovieff lent a computer to the 1968 exhibition “Cybernetic Serendipity” at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. Visitors could whistle a tune and the computer would analyze and repeat it, then improvise variations.

Continually upgrading the Putney studio was expensive. Mr. Zinovieff offered to donate the studio’s advanced technology to the British government, but he was ignored. To sustain the project, he and Mr. Cockerell decided to spin off a business.

So in 1969, Mr. Zinovieff, Mr. Cockerell and Tristram Cary, an electronic composer with his own studio, formed EMS. They built a rudimentary synthesizer the size of a shoe box for the Australian composer Don Banks that they later referred to as the VCS1.

In November, they unveiled the more elaborate VCS3, also known as the Putney. It used specifications from Mr. Zinovieff, a case and controls designed by Mr. Cary and circuitry designed by Mr. Cockerell (who drew on Robert Moog’s filter design research). It was priced at 330 pounds, about $7,700 now.

Yet the VCS3 was smaller and cheaper than other early synthesizers; the Minimoog didn’t arrive until 1970 and was more expensive. The original VCS3 had no keyboard and was best suited to generating abstract sounds, but EMS soon made a touch-sensitive keyboard module available. The VCS3 also had an input so it could process external sounds.

Musicians embraced the VCS3 along with other EMS instruments.

EMS synthesizers are prominent in songs like Pink Floyd’s “On the Run,” Roxy Music’s “Virginia Plain” and Kraftwerk’s “Autobahn,” and the Who used a VCS3 to process the sound of an electric organ on “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” King Crimson, Todd Rundgren, Led Zeppelin, Tangerine Dream, Aphex Twin and others also used EMS synthesizers.

“I hated anything to do with the commercial side,” Mr. Zinovieff told Sound on Sound magazine in 2016. He was more interested in contemporary classical uses of electronic sound. In the 1970s, he composed extensively, but much of his own music vanished because he would tape over ideas that he expected to improve.

He also collaborated with contemporary composers, including Harrison Birtwistle and Hans Werner Henze. “I didn’t want to have a commercial studio,” he said in 2010. “I wanted an experimental studio, where good composers could work and not pay.” Mr. Zinovieff and Mr. Birtwistle climbed to the top of Big Ben to record the clock mechanisms and gong sounds they incorporated in a quadraphonic 1971 piece, “Chronometer.”

Like other groundbreaking synthesizer companies, EMS had financial troubles. It filed for bankruptcy in 1979 after branching into additional products, including a video synthesizer, a guitar synthesizer and a vocoder.

Mr. Zinovieff handed over his full studio — including advanced prototypes of an interactive video terminal and a 10-octave pressure-sensitive keyboard — to the National Theater, in London, which belatedly found that it couldn’t raise funds to maintain it. The equipment was dismantled and stored for years in a basement, and it was eventually ruined in a flood.

Mr. Zinovieff largely stopped composing for decades. During that time he taught acoustics at the University of Cambridge.

But he wasn’t entirely forgotten. He worked for years on the intricate libretto for Mr. Birtwistle’s 1986 opera “The Mask of Orpheus,” which included a language Mr. Zinovieff constructed using the syllables in “Orpheus” and “Eurydice.”

In 2010, Mr. Zinovieff was commissioned to write music for a sculpture in Istanbul with 40 channels of sound. “Electronic Calendar: The EMS Tapes,” a collection of Mr. Zinovieff’s work and collaborations from 1965 to 1979 at Electronic Music Studios, was released in 2015.

Mr. Zinovieff learned new software, on computers that were exponentially more powerful than his 1970s equipment, and returned to composing throughout the 2010s, including pieces for cello and computer, for violin and computer and for computer and the spoken word. In 2020, during the pandemic, he collaborated with a granddaughter, Anna Papadimitriou, the singer in the band Hawxx, on a death-haunted piece called “Red Painted Ambulance.”

Mr. Zinovieff’s first three marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by his fourth wife, Jenny Jardine, and by six children — Sofka, Leo, Kolinka, Freya, Kitty and Eliena — and nine grandchildren.

A former employee, Robin Wood, revived EMS in 1997, reproducing the vintage equipment designs. An iPad app emulating the VCS3 was released in 2014.

Even in the 21st century, Mr. Zinovieff sought better music technology. In 2016, he told Sound on Sound that he felt limited by unresponsive interfaces — keyboards, touchpads, linear computer displays — and by playback through stationary, directional loudspeakers. He longed, he said, for “three-dimensional sound in the air around us.”

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World News

Rachmawati Sukarnoputri, 70, Sibling Rival in Indonesia Politics, Dies

Rachmawati Sukarnoputri, 70, Sibling Rival in Indonesia Politics, Dies

Mrs. Rachmawati entered politics after the fall of Suharto, helping to found the Pioneers’ Party in 2002. But it won only a tiny number of seats in Parliament. She joined the Nasdem Party in 2012 but quickly left it to join the Great Indonesia Movement Party, or Gerindra, the party of Suharto’s son-in-law Prabowo Subianto. At her death she was on its board of trustees.

Updated 

July 8, 2021, 6:10 p.m. ET

“Rachmawati always sided with anyone who opposed her eldest sister, including Prabowo,” said Andreas Harsono, a Human Rights Watch researcher who wrote a book about the early days of Indonesia, “Race, Islam and Power” (2019), and who knows the Sukarno siblings.

“It is a dysfunctional family,” he said.

Mrs. Rachmawati was accused of being involved in a plot in 2016 to rally hard-line Islamists to kidnap the Christian governor of Jakarta. She was one of 11 people arrested on treason charges related to the plot but was released a day later, denying that she had been involved and saying, “How could I be doing treason against the country that my father helped found?”

The Jakarta governor, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, was a close ally of President Joko Widodo, whose Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle was headed by Mrs. Megawati.

Diah Permana Rachmawati Sukarno was born in Jakarta on Sept. 27, 1950, to Sukarno and his third wife, Fatmawati, who was considered his official consort for ceremonial occasions. Rachmawati was the third of five children of that marriage and had several half-siblings from Sukarno’s eight other marriages.

Like Mrs. Megawati, she took on the patronymic Sukarnoputri, meaning daughter of Sukarno, to emphasize the connection to their father.

When she was 3, her mother left the palace in protest of Sukarno’s plans to take a new wife, and Rachmawati was raised mainly by a foster mother.

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Entertainment

June Finch, Virtuoso Dance Trainer With a Humane Contact, Dies at 81

June Finch, Virtuoso Dance Teacher With a Humane Touch, Dies at 81

June Finch, a dancer, choreographer and teacher who specialized in the technique of the choreographer Merce Cunningham, imparting it to generations of students, died on June 18 in a hospital in Manhattan. She was 81.

The cause was lung cancer, her niece Amy Verstappen said.

Known for her sophisticated sense of rhythm, egalitarian spirit and fierce devotion to the Cunningham technique — a system of movement that Cunningham developed to prepare the body for his complex choreography — Ms. Finch began teaching at the Merce Cunningham Studio in Manhattan in the late 1960s.

Often one of the first instructors people encountered in their study of Cunningham’s work, she trained hundreds of dancers who passed through the studio, including many who went on to join the illustrious ranks of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. (Ms. Finch never joined the company herself.)

On March 30, 2012, three years after Cunningham’s death, as the school prepared to close, Ms. Finch taught the final class at its longtime home, on the light-filled top floor of the Westbeth Artists Housing complex in the West Village. About a hundred people came to dance and watch. “Thunderous applause greeted June when she entered to teach,” the choreographer Pat Catterson wrote in an account of the class for Dance magazine.

In the competitive environment of the Cunningham studio, where dancers were often vying for coveted spots in the choreographer’s company, Ms. Finch stood out for the attention she gave students regardless of their star potential. Ms. Catterson, who trained with Ms. Finch for decades beginning in 1968, said most teachers at the school did not offer individualized attention “unless you were company material in their eyes.”

“June was not like that,” Ms. Catterson said in a phone interview. “She was really there to teach everyone in the room.” That approach continued through her recent teaching at 100 Grand, a loft in SoHo where Ms. Finch offered Saturday morning classes until March 2020, when the pandemic forced her to stop.

The dancer Janet Charleston, also a respected teacher of Cunningham technique, attended those weekend classes, where no dancer was too seasoned to learn from Ms. Finch.

“It was so nice, after studying that technique for decades, that someone would still have this eagle eye and could give very, very experienced dancers really valuable feedback,” Ms. Charleston said. “She watched people like a hawk. She was just completely involved.”

In a concise letter of recommendation dated Jan. 9, 1989, Cunningham himself expressed a similar sentiment, summing up his esteem for Ms. Finch in a single sentence: “To Whom It May Concern: June Finch is a fine teacher, with a rare and direct concern for the individuals with whom she is working.”

June Gebelein was born on June 13, 1940, in Taunton, Mass., the youngest of three siblings. Her mother, Roberta (Seaver) Gebelein, did volunteer work for families in need. Her father, Ernest George Gebelein, ran a factory that made bags and boxes for silverware and was later the president of a bank. (His father was George Gebelein, a famed Boston silversmith.)

From ages 4 to 17, Ms. Finch studied ballet in Taunton and Provincetown. She also took piano lessons and, from her great-aunt, learned a bit of country folk dancing.

She attended Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y., where she earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in dance, studying with the revered dance composition teacher Bessie Schonberg. She began training at the Cunningham Studio in 1965 and within a few years joined the faculty. From 1969 to 1977, she danced in the company of Viola Farber, a distinguished founding member of Cunningham’s company, who started her own troupe in 1968.

She married Caleb Finch, a scientist who also played fiddle in a bluegrass band, in 1965. Ms. Finch — whose deep, melodic voice was a hallmark of her classes — occasionally sang with the band. She and Mr. Finch, who is now a prominent researcher of human aging, divorced in the early 1970s, when he accepted a job in California and she chose to keep dancing in New York.

From 1977 to 1982, she created work as the artistic director of June Finch and Dancers. Reviewing an evening of her choreography at the Cunningham Studio in 1979, Jennifer Dunning of The New York Times called it “a program of fluid and elegant dance, performed by an equally elegant company of eight men and women.”

One of those women was the choreographer Elizabeth Streb, who first took a class with Ms. Finch in the mid-1970s. Ms. Streb said in an interview that students flocked to Ms. Finch in part because of her ability to get to the root of a technical problem, in a rigorous yet humane way. “She knew what part to fix that allowed everything else to come into line,” Ms. Streb said.

Ms. Finch also reached dancers outside of New York, teaching and staging Cunningham’s work at universities around the country and internationally. She spent summers throughout her life on Cape Cod, where she developed a small but dedicated student following and organized performances in Provincetown.

A dancer of small stature and impressive power, Ms. Finch performed with choreographers including Margaret Jenkins, Meredith Monk and Jeff Slayton, in addition to her work with Ms. Farber. Ms. Jenkins, who also taught for many years at the Cunningham studio, described Ms. Finch’s dancing as “wild and clear at the same time.”

As a teacher, Ms. Jenkins added, Ms. Finch was deeply loyal to Cunningham’s aesthetic but, within that loyalty, “inserted her own wit and precision and rhythm that was uniquely hers.”

Ms. Finch is survived by her sister, Peggy Sovek, and her brother, Robert Gebelein.

Jennifer Goggans, the program coordinator for the Merce Cunningham Trust and a former member of Cunningham’s company, recalled the inspiring, almost daunting force of Ms. Finch demonstrating movement in class. “I remember her going across the floor and bounding through space,” she said, “and thinking to myself, ‘How am I going to do that?’”

Students were also drawn to Ms. Finch’s nuanced musicality, which infused the exercises she taught.

“A rhythmic phrase, when it’s right, has an inevitability to it,” Ms. Catterson said, “and she really understood that.”

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Health

Dr. Barbara Murphy, Kidney Transplant Knowledgeable, Dies at 56

Dr. Barbara Murphy, Kidney Transplant Expert, Dies at 56

Dr. Barbara Murphy, a leading nephrologist who specialized in advanced research that focused on predicting and diagnosing the outcomes of kidney transplants, died on Wednesday at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan, where she had worked since 1997. She was 56.

The cause was glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer, her husband, Peter Fogarty, said.

Dr. Murphy blended a passion for research into kidney transplant immunology with her role, since 2012, as the chairwoman of the department of medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (and its broader health system). She was the first woman named to run a department of medicine at an academic medical center in New York City.

“In baseball, they talk about five-tool players,” Dr. Dennis S. Charney, dean of the Icahn School, said by phone. “I don’t know how many tools she had, but she was a very strong administrator, a great researcher and a great mentor to many people.”

Dr. Murphy, who was from Ireland, developed her interest in kidney transplantation while attending medical school at the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin. She was drawn especially to how it transformed patients’ lives.

“I love seeing how well patients do afterward,” she told Irish America magazine in 2016. “For all the years that I’ve been in this profession, the interaction between a living donor and a recipient in the recovery room still makes me proud to be a physician and to play a part in such a life-affirming moment.”

After being recruited to Mount Sinai in 1997, she joined other researchers in examining the role of H.I.V. in kidney disease and helped establish the viability of kidney transplants for patients with H.I.V. In a speech at the Royal College in 2018, she recalled that there had been criticism of such transplants — as if there were a “moral hierarchy when it came to donor kidneys.”

She added, “Two weeks ago, we received an email from one of our patients, thanking us on his 15th renal transplant birthday.”

More recently, Dr. Murphy’s research at her laboratory at Mount Sinai focused on the genetics and genomics of predicting the results of transplants, and on why some kidneys are rejected.

In findings reported in The Lancet in 2016, she and her collaborators said they had identified a set of 13 genes that predicted which patients would subsequently develop fibrosis, a hallmark of chronic kidney disease, and, ultimately, irreversible damage to the transplanted organ. Being able to predict which patients were at risk, they wrote, would allow for treatment to prevent fibrosis.

Her research has been licensed to two companies. One, Verici DX, which is still in validation trials in advance of commercial sales, is developing RNA signature tests to determine how a patient is responding to, and will respond to, a transplant. The other company, Renalytix, uses an algorithm guided by artificial intelligence to identify a kidney disease risk score for patients. Dr. Murphy served on the boards of both companies.

“Barbara was foundational to Verici,” Sara Barrington, the company’s chief executive, said by phone. She added, “Her lab will continue to file new discoveries out of her base research.”

Barbara Therese Murphy was born on Oct. 15, 1964, in South Dublin. Her father, John, owned an airfreight company, and her mother, Anne (Duffy) Murphy, worked with him and also designed bridal wear.

At age 4, Dr. Murphy recalled in a speech at a health care awards dinner sponsored by Irish America in 2016, she had to overcome a harsh judgment by a teacher.

“My elementary school teacher told my mother I was a dunce and I would never be anything, and what’s more she shouldn’t even try,” she said. “Fortunately, my parents persevered.”

After earning her medical degree at the Royal College in 1989, Dr. Murphy completed her residency and a nephrology fellowship at Beaumont Hospital, also in Dublin. She was also a nephrology fellow in the renal division of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, where she trained in transplant immunology.

In 1997, she was recruited to Mount Sinai as director of transplant nephrology by Dr. Paul Klotman, then the chief of the division of nephrology, who promoted her to his former position in 2003 after he had become chairman of Icahn’s department of medicine.

“She showed a lot of promise in transplant nephrology, which was emerging at the time,” Dr. Klotman, now the president of the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, said by phone. “Over the years, she developed good leadership skills: She was very organized and task oriented.”

In the spring of 2020, Dr. Murphy, like other physicians, noticed with alarm that Covid-19 was much more than a respiratory disease. It was causing a surge in kidney failure that led to shortages of machines, supplies and personnel needed for emergency dialysis.

The number of patients needing dialysis “is orders of magnitude greater than the number of patients we normally dialyze,” she told The New York Times.

One of Mount Sinai’s responses to the pandemic that May was to open the Center for Post-Covid Care for patients recovering from the virus. At the time, Mount Sinai had treated more than 8,000 patients who had been diagnosed with Covid-19.

“Barbara was instrumental in forming the center,” Dr. Charney said, “and she was involved in the follow-up as it related to kidney disease caused by Covid.”

Dr. Murphy was given the Young Investigator Award in Basic Science from the American Society of Transplantation in 2003 and was named nephrologist of the year by the American Kidney Fund in 2011. At her death, she was president-elect of the American Society of Nephrology.

In addition to her husband, Dr. Murphy is survived by their son, Gavin; her sister, Dr. Celine Murphy, a cardiologist who works in occupational health; her brother, Dr. Kieran Murphy, an interventional neuroradiologist; and her parents.

Dr. Murphy said she had learned an indelible lesson about the need for a strong patient-doctor relationship while still in medical school.

“Scholarship alone was not enough,” she said at the Irish America award ceremony. “An example: If we had a patient with rheumatoid arthritis and we shook their hands and they winced, it didn’t matter how much we knew about the disease or how to treat it, we’d failed our exam because we hadn’t taken the patient’s overall well-being into consideration.”

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Politics

Mike Gravel, Unconventional Two-Time period Alaska Senator, Dies at 91

Mike Gravel, Unconventional Two-Term Alaska Senator, Dies at 91

Mr. Gravel drew much more national notice on June 29, 1971. The New York Times and other newspapers were under court injunctions to stop publishing the Pentagon Papers, a secret, detailed government study of the war in Vietnam.

He read aloud from the papers to a subcommittee hearing that he had quickly called after Republicans thwarted his effort to read them to the entire Senate. He read for about three hours, finally breaking down in tears and saying, “Arms are being severed, metal is crashing through human bodies — because of a public policy this government and all of its branches continue to support.” (In a major ruling on press freedom, the injunction against The Times was overturned by the Supreme Court the next day.)

Mr. Gravel acknowledged many years later that his political ambition had led him to express support for the Vietnam War at the start of his political career, although he said he had personally opposed it.

In his 1968 Democratic primary challenge to Senator Ernest Gruening, one of two senators to vote against the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which authorized President Lyndon B. Johnson to use conventional military force in Southeast Asia, Mr. Gravel said the North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh and not the United States was the aggressor. In 2007, while running for president, he told an NPR interviewer, “I said what I said back in 1968 because it was to advance my career.”

He told Salon magazine the same year that Alaskans did not share Mr. Gruening’s opposition to the war at the time, and that “when I ran, being a realistic politician, all I had to do was stand up and not deal with the subject, and people would assume that I was to the right of Ernest Gruening, when in point of fact I was to the left of him.”

Mr. Gravel won that primary, stressing his youth (he was 38 to Mr. Gruening’s 81) and campaigning in the smallest of villages, where he showed a half-hour movie about his campaign. He went on to defeat his Republican rival, Elmer E. Rasmuson, a banker and former mayor of Anchorage, in the general election.

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Health

Ei-ichi Negishi, Nobel Prize Winner in Chemistry, Dies at 85

Ei-ichi Negishi, Nobel Prize Winner in Chemistry, Dies at 85

Ei-ichi Negishi, who shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2010 for developing techniques now ubiquitous in the manufacture of pharmaceuticals, died on June 6 in Indianapolis. He was 85.

His death, at a hospital, was announced by Purdue University, where Dr. Negishi was a professor for four decades. No cause was given.

Dr. Negishi’s Nobel-winning research involved chemical reactions that produce complex organic compounds — large carbon-based molecules used in drugs, plastics and many other industrial materials. Coaxing one carbon atom to bond to another can be difficult, but Dr. Negishi and other chemists figured out that metals, palladium in particular, could be used as intermediary matchmakers.

In these reactions, two carbon-based molecules first stick to the palladium. The palladium then disconnects from them, and the two carbons attach to each other, forming a new, larger molecule. With the palladium working as a catalyst, the organic chemistry reactions can run at lower temperatures with fewer steps, reducing cost and waste.

“It just allows this enormous selectivity,” said James M. Tour, a professor of chemistry at Rice University in Houston, who was a graduate student of Dr. Negishi’s. “When you build molecules, you have to be able to work on one part of the molecule without destroying the other part.”

Chemists had discovered the magic of palladium earlier, and in 1977 Dr. Negishi built on that work by using zinc compounds to ease the mingling of carbon atoms on palladium. That made the process more applicable to a wider range of reactions.

“Without organic compounds, none of us can live,” Dr. Negishi said in a news conference on the day the Nobel was announced. “One of our major dream goals is to be able to synthesize any organic compounds in high yield, high efficiency.”

He gave as an analogy the creating of elaborate Lego formations. “That is a pretty accurate description of what we have been trying to do,” he said.

Traditionally, organic chemists largely limited themselves to molecules using the 10 or so elements found in organic compounds. Dr. Negishi said that he and others had “realized that we should make use of the entire periodic table.”

By expanding to other elements like palladium, chemists in effect increased the number of Lego pieces they could use, and that opened new avenues to synthesize the molecules they wanted to make.

Dr. Negishi shared the 2010 Nobel in Chemistry with Richard F. Heck of the University of Delaware and Akira Suzuki of Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan.

Unlike many Nobelists who say they never expected to receive the highest honor in the science world, Dr. Negishi said it was “not a major surprise” to receive an early morning phone call on Oct. 6, 2010, from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which administers the Nobels.

Dr. Tour said Dr. Negishi had pursued research that he thought was Nobel-worthy. “He dreamed about it,” Dr. Tour said. “He often discussed the Nobel Prize. And what would have to be done to win this.”

To that end, Dr. Negishi could be relentless. “He was extremely exacting,” Dr. Tour said. “He had no trouble pushing people to the point of tears at a blackboard.”

Dr. Tour said Dr. Negishi also had a generous side. “If anybody would walk up to his office door and knock, his door was always open,” Dr. Tour said. “And you’d usually sit down for much longer than you bargained for, because he analyzed the whole project you’re working on, not just the question that you’re asking.”

Ei-ichi Negishi was born on July 14, 1935, in Changchun, China, then known as Hsinking, the capital of the Japanese-controlled part of the country, in the northeast. His family moved to Tokyo after World War II and then to a rural area outside Tokyo, where his father farmed and his mother took care of the family’s five children.

After graduating from the University of Tokyo in 1958 with a bachelor of engineering degree, he worked as a research chemist at the Iwakuni Research Laboratories in Japan. By his account, he realized that he needed more academic training but felt that graduate school was financially out of reach.

His fortunes changed in 1960, however, when he won a Fulbright scholarship to attend the University of Pennsylvania. After finishing his doctorate in 1963, he joined the laboratory of Herbert C. Brown at Purdue. Dr. Brown became the first Purdue faculty member to win a Nobel Prize, in 1979; Dr. Negishi was the second.

“In terms of research, he is my only mentor,” Dr. Negishi said of Dr. Brown in an interview after the Nobel announcement. “I have had other professors, but he taught me just about everything as to how to do research.”

Dr. Negishi moved to Syracuse University as an assistant professor in 1972 and returned to Purdue in 1979 as a professor. He retired in 2019, having been an author of more than 400 scientific papers.

In 2010, Dr. Negishi, who remained a Japanese citizen, received the Order of Culture from Emperor Akihito. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2014.

Survivors include two daughters, four grandchildren and one great-granddaughter. His wife of 58 years, Sumire, died in 2018.

“When he got his Nobel Prize, he became nicer,” Dr. Tour said. “He’d take his wallet out of his pocket, and protruding from his wallet was the Nobel Prize medallion.”

Dr. Tour said Dr. Negishi would pass the medal around and didn’t mind when someone once dropped it. “You could see the ding in one side of it,” Dr. Tour said. “And he just laughed about it.”

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Health

Richard R. Ernst, Nobelist Who Paved Method for M.R.I., Dies at 87

Richard R. Ernst, Nobelist Who Paved Way for M.R.I., Dies at 87

Richard R. Ernst, a Swiss chemist who received the 1991 Nobel Prize for his work on refining nuclear magnetic resonance or NMR spectroscopy, the powerful chemical analysis method of MRT technology, died on June 4th in Winterthur in northern Switzerland. He was 87.

The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich), at which Dr. Ernst, who had spent most of his career, announced the death on their website. No reason was given.

Dr. Ernst – whose work and interests included chemistry, physics, math, music, and the arts – helped develop NMR from a time-consuming niche technique to a critical scientific tool routinely used in local hospitals and chemistry laboratories.

As a chemist, he was outstanding.

“Comparing him to Einstein would offend physicists,” says Jeffrey A. Reimer, an NMR expert at the University of California at Berkeley. “But as far as its effect in the discipline is concerned, seriousness is fundamental.”

Dr. Serious was driven and demanding – especially of himself – and even as his stature grew, colleagues and former students said he had remarkably little ego. He was quick to pay tribute to his co-workers and to describe his own contributions in humble terms.

“I’m not really what you would imagine as a scientist who wants to understand the world,” he said in a 2001 Nobel interview. He continued, “I’m a toolmaker, not a real scientist in that sense, and I wanted to offer these problem-solving skills to other people.”

NMR spectroscopy was first developed in the 1940s and early 50s by Felix Bloch and Edward Mills Purcell, who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1952 for this achievement. With this technique, scientists place a substance in a magnetic field that aligns the nuclei of its atoms. Then they bombard it with radio pulses that throw the nuclei out of alignment. When the nuclei realign themselves, the atoms emit unique electromagnetic signals that can be analyzed to determine the chemical composition and molecular structure of the material.

When Dr. Ernst, when he started studying NMR in the late 1950s, as a PhD student, researchers had to slowly scan a substance in a magnet and use continuous radio waves. She suffered, wrote Dr. Ernst in an autobiographical sketch on the Nobel website, “with a disappointingly low sensitivity that severely limits its application possibilities”.

Instead of slowly scanning a substance, Dr. Serious them with a short but intense pulse of radio waves. Then, with the help of a computer, he used a complex mathematical operation to analyze the signal. This method, known as Fourier transform NMR or FT-NMR, was much more sensitive and allowed scientists to study more types of atoms and molecules, especially those that were low in abundance.

“That was a very great invention that was ahead of its time,” says Matthias Ernst, physical chemist at ETH Zurich, who was a former student of Dr. Serious was (and is not related). That was the 1960s and the era of personal computing had not yet begun; Instead, Dr. Ernst and his colleagues transfer their data from the perforated tape to punch cards and then take them to a data center for processing.

In the 1970s, Dr. Seriously the two-dimensional NMR. This technique involves bombarding samples with sequences of radio pulses over time. The resulting signals provide more information about the sample and enable scientists to determine the exact composition and structure of large and complex biological molecules.

“It was beautiful,” said Dr. Reimer, an undergraduate chemistry student, as Dr. Ernst published his results. “Richard really did everything.”

Two-dimensional NMR is the foundation of MRI, a medical advance that enabled doctors to create detailed images of the body’s internal structures. “He made NMR the powerful technique it is in chemistry, biochemistry and biology today,” said Robert Tycko, physical chemist at the National Institutes of Health and president of the International Society of Magnetic Resonance, in a telephone interview.

Dr. Ernst was on a transatlantic flight when his Nobel Prize in Chemistry was announced in October 1991; he learned of the honor from the pilot. But in accordance with his characteristic modesty, he was unsettled when he was the only winner.

“He was very happy about the recognition,” says Beat H. Meier, physical chemist at ETH. “

Richard Robert Ernst was born on August 14, 1933 in Winterthur as the son of the architects Robert Ernst and Irma Ernst-Brunner. As a child he developed a passion for music and chemistry. When he was 13 years old, he found a box of chemicals in the attic of his house and learned that it belonged to an uncle.

“I was almost immediately fascinated by the possibilities of trying out all conceivable reactions with them, some of which led to explosions, others to unbearable air pollution in our house, which terrified my parents,” he wrote in his Nobel sketch. He started devouring chemistry books and gave up plans to become a composer.

He did his bachelor’s degree in chemistry at ETH Zurich in 1956 and then briefly served in the Swiss military before returning to ETH in 1962 for his doctorate in physical chemistry.

The next year he married Magdalena Kielholz. The bereaved are his wife and their three children Anna, Katharina and Hans-Martin. Matthias Ernst, his former student, said Dr. Ernst died in an old people’s home.

In 1963, Dr. Ernst joined the technology company Varian Associates in Palo Alto, California as a scientist. There he developed FT-NMR

He returned to ETH 1968 and taught and researched there until his retirement in 1998. In addition to the Nobel Prize, he received the Wolf Prize for Chemistry, the Horwitz Prize, the Marcel Benoist Prize and 17 honorary doctorates.

Dr. Ernst was an avowed “workaholic”, as he put it.

“He had dinner with his wife and then went back to his desk and worked late into the night,” says Alexander Wokaun, retired chemist and emeritus professor at the ETH. Ernst received his doctorate. Students. “But in this total devotion to science, I think he showed us what can be achieved.”

Dr. Ernst gave his students freedom and was interested in the work of young scientists who had not yet made a name for themselves. “At meetings of scientists or scientific conferences,” said Dr. Tycko, “he sat in the front row and took careful notes and listened to other people describe their work, which is actually very unusual for someone of his stature.”

Dr. Ernst maintained his love of music and also developed a passion for Tibetan scroll paintings, which he put together with his wife and adorned almost every wall of their home with them, said Dr. Wokaun. He used advanced laboratory techniques to examine the paintings’ pigments to find out where and when they were made.

After receiving his Nobel Prize, he traveled and lectured on the responsibility he believed scientists have to contribute to society.

“He always said to me, ‘It’s not enough for a scientist to accumulate knowledge just for the sake of knowledge,'” said Dr. Wokaun. “‘What for, for what purpose are you doing this?'”

Categories
Entertainment

Ned Beatty, Actor Identified for ‘Community’ and ‘Deliverance,’ Dies at 83

Ned Beatty, Actor Known for ‘Network’ and ‘Deliverance,’ Dies at 83

Ned Beatty, who received an Oscar nomination for his role in “Network” during a prolific acting career that spanned more than four decades and delivered a memorably harrowing performance as the weekend outdoor man on “Deliverance” by the backwoodsmen in “Deliverance.” attacked died at his home in Los Angeles on Sunday. He was 83.

His death was confirmed by his manager Deborah Miller, who did not give the cause.

The beefy Mr. Beatty was not known as the leading man. In more than 150 film and television projects from 1972 onwards, he was almost always cast in supporting roles. But it was closely tied to some of Hollywood’s most enduring films.

His films include “All the President’s Men” (1976), “Superman” (1978) and its first sequel, the inspirational sports drama “Rudy” (1993) and the Rodney Dangerfield comedy “Back to School” (1986).

He was also a familiar face on television. From 1993 to 1995 he played Stanley Bolander, the detective known as “Big Man” in the series “Homicide: Life on the Street”. He was also in several episodes of “Roseanne,” Roseanne Barr’s hit sitcom, as Ed. seen Conner, the cheerful father of John Goodman’s character Dan, and in episodes of Law & Order, The Rockford Files, and other shows.

In 1976, Mr. Beatty was cast by director Sidney Lumet and screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky on Network, the critically acclaimed satire about a television network’s battle for ratings in a tube-obsessed nation. His character, mustached network manager Arthur Jensen, gave a memorable monologue that earned Mr. Beatty an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor.

In the scene, Mr. Beatty’s character Howard Beale (Peter Finch), the unstable presenter who just had an on-air crisis, calls into the boardroom and draws the curtains. With the camera pointed at Mr. Beatty, who is standing at the far end of a conference table lined with bank lamps, he unleashes a wild self-talk. Mr. Beale has a lot to learn about the business world, he preaches.

“You have interfered with the elemental forces of nature, Mr. Beale,” says Mr. Beatty in a roaring voice. “And you will atone.”

Mr. Beatty then modulates his presentation and asks in a normal speaking voice: “Can I get through to you?”

In the book “Mad as Hell: The Making of ‘Network’ and the Fateful Vision of the Angriest Man in Movies” (2014) by Dave Itzkoff, a culture reporter for the New York Times, Mr. Beatty is quoted as saying: that he Intimidated by the length of the speech but excited by the character and the movie.

To get the filmmakers to give him the role, Mr. Beatty said, he told them that he had another film offer for more money.

“I lied like a snake,” he added. “I think they liked the fact that I was at least trying to be smart. I’ve done something that might be in your dictionary. “

Mr. Beatty made his film debut in Deliverance, the 1972 adaptation of James Dickey’s novel about four friends whose canoe trip in rural Georgia is disastrous. Stripped in white underpants, his character Bobby is forced by a hillbilly to “squeak like a pig” before he is raped.

The line would go down in film family.

“’Squeak like a pig.’ How many times have this been shouted, said, or whispered to me since? ”Mr. Beatty wrote in an opinion piece for the New York Times in 1989 with the provocative headline,“ Suppose Men Feared Rape ”.

Mr. Beatty did not distance himself from the scene.

“I suppose if someone (invariably a man) yells this at me, I should duck my head and look embarrassed to be recognized as the actor who suffered this shame,” he wrote. “But I’m just proud to be part of this story that director John Boorman made a classic. I think Bill McKinney (who portrayed the attacker) and I played the ‘rape’ scene as well as it could be played. “

Ned Thomas Beatty was born on July 6, 1937 in Louisville, Kentucky, to Charles and Margaret (Lennis) Beatty. He attended Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky on a music scholarship before starting his acting career.

He spent much of the early part of his career in regional theater, including eight years at the Arena Stage in Washington. In a 2003 interview, he told The Times that at the beginning of his career he had an average of 13 to 15 shows a year on stage and spent up to 300 days performing.

Mr. Beatty’s survivors include his fourth wife, Sandra Johnson. Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.

Mr. Beatty played Big Daddy, the plantation owner, the patriarch of a troubled Southern family, in the Broadway revival of Tennessee Williams’ “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” which also starred Jason Patric and Ashley Judd. He had previously played the same role in the London production of The Revival for which he was nominated for an Olivier Award.

Mr Beatty honestly judged his co-stars, saying that Broadway relied too much on celebrities and pushed them into challenging roles for which they did not have the acting skills.

“In the theater you want to go from here to there, you want something to be about,” he said. “Stage actors learn how to do it. Movie actors often don’t even think about it. They do what the director asks them to do and they never give information about their performance – call it what you want – consistently, objectively. “

Although best known as a dramatic actor, Mr. Beatty also gave notable performances in several comedic roles.

In “Superman” (1978) he played Otis, the clumsy rogue of the villain Lex Luthor (Gene Hackman), who is involved in Luther’s interception of nuclear warheads, but is especially noticeable for his strange ignorance. Two years later he repeated the role in “Superman II”.

In 1986 he asserted himself to Rodney Dangerfield as the exuberant and unscrupulous Dean Martin of the fictional Grand Lakes University in “Back to School”. When he offers to join Thornton Melon (Mr. Dangerfield), the owner of a chain of large clothing stores, in exchange for donating a building, the business school director contradicts the quid pro quo.

“But I want to say in all fairness to Mr. Melon,” replies Mr. Beatty’s character, “that was a really big check.”

Mr. Beatty played many other small but significant roles, including the voice of Lotso, a teddy bear who turned bad, in Toy Story 3 (2010). In “Rudy”, the 1993 film about a University of Notre Dame soccer player who forms the team, he played the small but important role of Daniel Rüttiger, the working father of the title character. When he first steps into the stadium, the moment overwhelms him.

“That”, he says, “is the most beautiful sight these eyes have ever seen.”

Jordan Allen contributed to the coverage.