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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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84
Born 1937-03-24. Domain:Performing. Cause of death:Age
Romain Bouteille was a French playwright, actor, comedian, and singer of anarchist inspiration. In 1968, he met Coluche. Together, they founded the troupe Café de la Gare. The same year, he separated from his partner Sotha who married Patrick Dewaere. Both were members of the troop.
84
Born 1935-06-13. Domain:Art. Cause of death:Age
Christo Vladimirov Javacheff and Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon were a married couple who created environmental works of art. Christo and Jeanne-Claude were born on the same day, June 13, 1935; Christo in Gabrovo, Bulgaria, and Jeanne-Claude in Morocco. They first met in Paris in October 1958 when Christo painted a portrait of Jeanne-Claude's mother. They then fell in love through creating art work together. Jeanne-Claude died, aged 74, on November 18, 2009, from complications of a brain aneurysm. Christo died, aged 84, on May 31, 2020, of natural causes.
77
Born 1941-00-00. Domain:Directing. Cause of death:Age
Peter Clifton, perhaps best known for directing the Led Zeppelin concert film The Song Remains the Same (1976).
59
Born 1959-03-12. Domain:Science (Medical/Bio style). Cause of death:Murder
Steven Pitt was an American forensic psychiatrist. Pitt was a professor of psychiatry at the University of Arizona College of Medicine. In 2006 Pitt helped the police identify the Baseline killer who had raped and murdered a series of women in Phoenix, Arizona. Pitt worked extensively on the JonBenét Ramsey case — where he was retained by both the police and prosecutor. He also worked in the investigation of the Columbine High School massacre, the Deer Creek Middle School shooting, and the Kobe Bryant sexual assault case. In May and June 2018, a spree killer sought out and fatally shot six people in Scottsdale, Arizona, United States. The shooting spree began on May 30 and ended June 4, when the shooter killed himself as police closed in. The shooter was Dwight Lamon Jones, aged 56. The story was covered on Dateline NBC on June 29, 2018. The victims of the initial shootings were a noted forensic psychiatrist, two paralegals, and a counselor; all were shot within 24 hours of each other and within a 10 mile radius in Scottsdale and Phoenix. The other two victims were discovered June 4. Steven Pitt (59), a well-known forensic psychiatrist was shot and killed outside his office at 5:20pm on Thursday 31 May. Pitt had examined Jones in connection with a "bitter" divorce. In 2006 Pitt helped the police identify the Baseline killer who had raped and murdered a series of women in Phoenix, Arizona. Veleria Sharp (48), and Laura Anderson (49), paralegals, were shot and killed at 2:15pm on Friday, 1 June in the downtown Scottsdale offices of Burt, Feldman, Grenier, the law firm where they worked. A lawyer at the firm had worked on the Jones divorce. By 11:30 pm on Friday June 1, police knew that the same gun had been used to kill Anderson, Sharp and Pitt. The body of Marshall Levine (72), a psychologist and counselor, was found just after midnight, as Friday turned to Saturday, June 2, in his Scottsdale office. Levine was subletting his office from a woman who had provided counseling services to his son during the divorce, Jones' intended target. By Sunday afternoon, police had Jones under surveillance as he drove around Fountain Hills in his gold Mercedes Benz. At one point, Jones ditched a small bag containing a .22-caliber pistol, which police later determined to belong to one of two people, 70-year-old Mary Simmons and 72-year-old Bryon Thomas, who were shot and killed inside a Fountain Hills home. Their bodies were not discovered until Monday, 4 June. Police stated that ballistics ruled out the 22-caliber gun from having been used in any of the shootings.
100
Born 1911-06-20. Domain:Sport. Cause of death:Age
He was a racing driver, journalist and publisher from Germany, who founded the magazine Das Auto. He was the first German ever to take part in a Formula One Grand Prix.
75
Born 1935-09-25. Domain:Writing. Cause of death:Cancer
Jennifer Louise Worth RN RM (née Lee) was a British memoirist. She wrote a best-selling trilogy about her work as a nurse and midwife practicing in the poverty-stricken East End of London in the 1950s: Call the Midwife, Shadows of the Workhouse and Farewell to The East End. A television series, Call the Midwife, based on her books, began broadcasting on BBC One on 15 January 2012. After leaving nursing, she re-trained as a musician. Worth died having been diagnosed with cancer of the oesophagus earlier in the year. Deeply religious, she had a commitment to God. The first episode of the television series Call the Midwife, based on her experiences in Poplar, London, in the late 1950s, was dedicated to her.
98
Born 1911-12-25. Domain:Sculpting. Cause of death:Age
She was a French-born American artist and sculptor. Her most famous works are possibly the spider structures, titled Maman, from the last dozen years.
54
Born 1956-00-00. Domain:Sport. Cause of death:Murder
Çetin Topçuoglu was a former European taekwondo champion.
He was in the Gaza flotilla raid, on the MV Mavi Marmara, and was killed by Israeli Defense Forces.
97
Born 1912-02-02. Domain:Society. Cause of death:Age
She was the last living survivor of the sinking of the RMS Titanic, which occurred on 15 April 1912. At nine weeks of age, she was also the youngest passenger on board.
75
Born 1929-08-11. Domain:Society. Cause of death:Cancer
Her father died when she was 9. She started to prostitute herself at the beginning of the sixties. In her first book, Le noir est une couleur (Black is a color), she told her story in a blunt and honest way, with a dark lyrical tone she got from her own experience. During the seventies, Réal became an activist, in particular with the occupation of the Chapelle Saint-Bernard, in Paris, in June 1975. She rejected the argument of the alienation by the pimps, and stated that prostitution could be a choice, a free-will decision. The revolutionary whore was born. Réal stopped prostitution in 1995, at the age of 66.
62
Born 1941-08-01. Domain:Music. Cause of death:Stroke
Roda-Gil was also an anarchist and often participated in demonstrations of the Confédération nationale du travail.
86
Born 1913-02-18. Domain:Writing. Cause of death:Cancer
75
Born 1920-10-22. Domain:Writing. Cause of death:cancer (prostate)
Advocate of psychedelic drug research and use.
In early 1995, Leary discovered that he was terminally ill with inoperable prostate cancer. He did not reveal the condition to the press upon diagnosis, but did so after the death of Jerry Garcia in August.
Leary authored an outline for a book called Design for Dying, which attempted to show people a new perspective of death and dying. "The most important thing you do in your life is to die" he claimed happily, welcoming death with the same energetic excitement he had welcomed most other challenges in his life. Leary's de facto "family"--his staff of technophilic Gen Xers--updated his website on a daily basis as a sort of proto-blog, noting his daily intake of various illicit and legal chemical substances, with a predilection for nitrous oxide, cigarettes, his trademark "Leary biscuits", and eventually heroin and morphine. His sterile house was completely redecorated by the staff, who had more or less moved in, with an array of surreal ornamentation. In his final months thousands of visitors, well wishers and old friends visited him in his California home. Until the final weeks of his illness, Leary gave many interviews discussing his new philosophy of embracing death.
For a number of years, Leary was reported to have been excited by the possibility of freezing his body in cryonic suspension. He didn't believe that he would be resurrected in the future, but he recognized the importance of cryonic possibilities. He called it his "duty as a futurist," and helped publicize the process. Privately he dismissed cryonics as "a joke" and did not seem to regard the process with much seriousness. Leary had relationships with two cryonic organizations, the original ALCOR and then the offshoot CRYOCARE. A cryonic tank was delivered to Leary's house in the months before his death. However, Leary subsequently requested that his body be cremated, which it was, and distributed among his friends and family.
Leary's death was videotaped for posterity at his request, capturing his final words. This video has never been publicly seen but will be included in a documentary currently in production[citation needed]. At one point in his final delirium, he said, "Why not?" to his son Zachary. He uttered the phrase repeatedly, in different intonations and died soon after. His last word, according to Zach Leary, was "beautiful". With the movie Timothy Leary's Dead, filmmakers capitalized on his initial desire for cryogenic preservation by creating a fake decapitation sequence.
Seven grams of Leary's ashes were arranged by his friend at Celestis to be buried in space aboard a rocket carrying the remains of 24 other people including Gene Roddenberry (creator of Star Trek), Gerard O'Neill (space physicist), Krafft Ehricke (rocket scientist), and others. A Pegasus rocket containing their remains was launched on February 9, 1997, and remained in orbit for six years until it burnt up in the atmosphere.
89
Born 1899-11-30. Domain:Writing. Cause of death:Age
Amélie Audiberti, born Élisabeth Cécile Amélie Savane on November 30, 1899 in Saint-Pierre (Martinique) and died on May 31, 1988 in Massy (Essonne), is a French translator, mainly known for being at the origin of the first translation of the novel 1984 of George Orwell. She invented several neologisms, some of which have passed into common parlance, such as "novlangue". She is also the wife of the writer and playwright Jacques Audiberti and the mother of the author Marie-Louise Audiberti.
64
Born 1921-05-07. Domain:Society. Cause of death:Cancer
He was a well-known French alpinist and mountain guide. The climbing technique, to gaston, was named after him. He was a recipient of France's prestigious Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur in 1984.
31
Born 1950-04-20. Domain:Sport. Cause of death:Accident
Killed in an accident during the bike's GP of Yougoslavia.
66
Born 1910-02-09. Domain:Science (Medical/Bio style). Cause of death:Age
He was a French biologist who was awarded a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1965. Born in Paris, he was also awarded several other honours and distinctions, among them the Légion d'honneur. Monod (along with François Jacob) is famous for his work on the Lac operon. Study of the control of expression of genes in the Lac operon provided the first example of a transcriptional regulation system. He also suggested the existence of mRNA molecules that link the information encoded in DNA and proteins.
"A scientist who believes in god suffers from schizophrenia"
85
Born 1883-12-19. Domain:Writing. Cause of death:Age
Politically, a follower of Charles Maurras, his views evolved towards fascism in the 1930s. Bonnard was one of the ministers of National Education under the Vichy regime (1942-44). He was nicknamed by Pétain "la Gestapette" by French nationalists, a portmanteau of Gestapo and tapette, the latter French slang for a homosexual. A member of the Académie française, Bonnard was one of four members expelled from the institution after World War II for collaboration with Germany. He was condemned in absentia to death during the épuration légale period for his wartime activities. However, Franco granted him political asylum in Spain. In 1960, he returned to France to face retrial for his crimes. He received a symbolic sentence of 10 years banishment to be counted from 1945, but dissatisfied with the verdict of guilty, he chose to return to Spain where he lived out the remainder of his life.
41
Born 1904-04-21. Domain:Society. Cause of death:Suicide
Odilo Lothar Ludwig Globocnik was an Austrian Nazi and a Holocaust perpetrator. He was an official of the Nazi Party and later a high-ranking leader of the SS. He had a leading role in Operation Reinhard, which organized the murder of around one and a half million mostly Polish Jews during the Holocaust in the Majdanek, Treblinka, Sobibor and Belzec extermination camps. Historian Michael Allen described him as "the vilest individual in the vilest organization ever known". Globocnik died by suicide shortly after being captured and detained by British soldiers. Globocnik committed suicide by biting on a cyanide capsule.
65
Born 1866-03-04. Domain:Science (Math style). Cause of death:Age
He was a French mathematician and astronomer. Born in Amiens, he studied at the École Normale Supérieure from 1883 to 1888. His studies included the rings and satellites of Saturn, comets and double stars, but is best remembered for work with his engineer brother François on surface mechanics, particularly problems of elasticity.