The 1980s: Science and Technology: Deaths

THE 1980s: SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY: DEATHS

George Abell, 57, astronomer whose discovery, the Abell Galaxy, was for many years the largest known object in the universe, 7 October 1983.

Luis W. Alvarez, 77, Nobel Prize-winning physicist and proponent of the theory that the dinosaur extinctions were caused by a comet striking the earth, 1 September 1988.

Frederik Barry Bang, 64, biologist and expert on parasitic disease, 3 October 1981.

Gregory Bateson, 76, British-born anthropologist and former husband and collaborator of Margaret Mead, 4 July 1980.

William Behrens, 63, naval admiral and oceanographer, 21 January 1986.

George Packer Berry, 87, virologist and dean of the Harvard Medical School (1949-1966), 5 October 1986.

Junius Bouton Bird, 74, prominent archaeologist with the American Museum of Natural History in New York, 2 April 1982.

Walter Houser Brattain, 85, physicist and coinventor of the transistor, 13 October 1987.

Harrison Brown, 69, atomic scientist who played a key role in developing the atomic bomb, 8 December 1986.

Kurt Heinrich Debus, 74, electrical and rocket engineer, director of the Kennedy Space Center at the time of the first moon landing, 10 October 1983.

Paul Adrian Maurice Dirac, 82, physicist and cowinner of the 1983 Nobel Prize for physics, 20 October 1984.

Donald W. Douglas, 88, aircraft designer and businessman, 2 February 1981.

Richard G. Drew, 81, chemist who invented Scotch transparent tape, 7 December 1980.

René Jules Dubos, 81, French-born bacteriologist and crusader against pollution, 20 February 1982.

Richard F. Feynman, 69, Nobel Prize-winning physicist, 15 February 1988.

Paul John Flory, 75, Nobel Prize-winning chemist and human-rights activist, 9 September 1985.

Diane Fossey, 53, American naturalist famous for studying the mountain gorillas of Africa, 26 December 1985.

R. Buckminster Fuller, 87, futurist and inventor of the geodesic dome, 3 July 1983.

Paul Gross, 91, specialist in physical inorganic and fluorine chemistry, 4 May 1986.

Gaylord P. Harnwell, 78, atomic physicist and educator, 18 April 1982.

Banesh Hoffmann, 79, British-born mathematician and collaborator with Albert Einstein, 5 August 1986.

James R. Killian Jr., 83, first presidential assistant (to Dwight D. Eisenhower) for science and technology, and former president of MIT, 29 January 1988.

Choh Hao Li, 74, Chinese-born biochemist who synthesized human pituitary growth hormone in 1971, 28 November 1987.

George M. Low, 58, rocket scientist and driving force in the Apollo space program, 17 July 1984.

Henry William Menard, 65, marine geologist whose work contributed to plate tectonics theory, 9 February 1986.

John H. Northrop, 95, cowinner of the 1946 Nobel Prize for chemistry, 27 May 1987.

George Polya, 97, professor of mathematics and author of the best-selling How to Solve It, 7 September 1985.

Isidor Isaac Rabi, 89, Nobel Prize-winning atomic scientist, 11 January 1988.

James Rainwater, 68, atomic physicist, cowinner of 1975 Nobel Prize, 31 May 1986.

Joseph Rhine, 84, pioneering parapsychologist, 20 February 1980.

Charles F. Richter, 85, seismologist who developed the Richter scale of earthquake magnitude, 30 September 1985.

Hyman G. Rickover, 86, naval admiral who oversaw the development of the nuclear submarine fleet, 8 July 1986.

Julia Bowman Robinson, 65, first woman mathematician elected to the National Academy of Sciences, 30 July 1985.

Emilio Gino Segre, 84, Nobel Prize-winning nuclear physicist and discoverer of the antiproton, 22 April 1989.

William Bradford Shockley, 79, Nobel-Prize-winning physicist whose coinvention of the transistor was later overshadowed by his repeated assertions that blacks were genetically inferior to whites, 12 August 1989.

Stanislaw Marcin Ulam, 75, Polish-born mathematician who worked on the hydrogen bomb, 13 May 1984.

Harold Urey, 87, Nobel Prize-winning chemist who discovered deuterium, an element of the hydrogen bomb, 5 January 1981.

Cornells Bernardus Van Niel, 87, Dutch-born microbiologist who first explained the chemical basis of photosynthesis, 10 March 1985.

Sewall Wright, 98, geneticist who developed a mathematical model for evolution, 3 March 1988.

Jerrold R. Zacharias, 81, science educator and designer of the first atomic clock, 16 July 1986.