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Cowan George (b. 1920-02-15 / d. 2012-04-20)
He was an American physical chemist, a businessman and philanthropist. Cowan received a B.S. from Worcester Polytechnic Institute in 1941. He did graduate studies at Princeton, where he worked under future Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner, whose investigation of uranium confirmed the feasibility of the Fermi pile. He continued his nuclear research with the Manhattan Project at the University of Chicago, Oak Ridge, Columbia University, and Los Alamos. Because he was transferred to various locations as a technological troubleshooter for the effort, he was among the very few people with knowledge of the separate components of the bomb, kept apart for security reasons. He joined the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1946. He earned a Ph.D. from the Mellon College of Science in 1950. Weeks after his arrival at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1949, he directed the detection of radioactive fallout from samples collected near the Russian border indicating the Soviets were in possession of a nuclear bomb. He later served on the Bethe Panel that convinced government decision makers the radiochemistry detected represented weapons uses rather than peaceful pursuits.
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78
Born 1935-08-15. Domain:Writing. Cause of death:Heart attack
She was a French author, editor, director, and playwright. One of her novels, La Bicyclette bleue ("The Blue Bicycle"), published in 1981, was France's biggest bestseller. In 2000, it was made into a television series. A story of love, obsession, and survival set during the turmoil of World War II, it developed into a successful series of seven books. While writing fror the communist daily, l'Humanité, she was accused to defend a false jew but real antisemite, Israel Shamir. She was formerly president of the Société des Gens de Lettres de France and a member of the Prix Femina jury.
90
Born 1907-09-23. Domain:Writing. Cause of death:Age
She wrote under the pseudonyms Dominique Aury and Pauline Réage.
She did an interview about erotic books in 1975 with author and publisher Régine Deforges, yet at the time her authorship of Story of O was still unknown. Desclos publicly admitted that she was the author of The Story of O forty years after the book was published, in an interview with The New Yorker magazine.
She was actively bisexual at times in her life.