She was among hundreds of women who said they were coerced into sterilization at a California hospital in the 1970s. The lawsuit led to state and national reforms.Dolores Madrigal, the lead plaintiff in a landmark lawsuit brought by Latina women in California who said they were coerced into unwanted sterilization during childbirth at a Los Angeles hospital in the early 1970s, died on Nov. 9 in Las Vegas. She was 90.The death, at a hospice facility, was confirmed by her son Oren Madrigal.Ms. Madrigal was among several hundred Spanish-speaking women who said they were pressured into signing consent forms — written in English — agreeing to have their fallopian tubes tied during cesarean section deliveries. Ten of them filed a federal class action lawsuit against the Los Angeles County-U.S.C. Medical Center in 1975.The sterilizations occurred amid political hysteria about overpopulation: In 1970, President Richard M. Nixon had established the Commission on Population Growth and the American Future, led by John D. Rockefeller III. The plaintiffs argued that the hospital, which received state and federal funding for family planning programs, was trying to lower the birthrate of Mexican American women — a charge hospital administrators and medical staff denied.After a bench trial in 1978, Judge Jesse W. Curtis Jr. of U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California ruled against the plaintiffs, writing in his decision that their “ability to understand and speak English is limited,” that the case was “essentially the result of a breakdown in communications” and that “one can hardly blame the doctors.”Ms. Madrigal’s experience showed otherwise, her attorneys had argued, and ultimately led to state and national reforms, including mandatory waiting periods for the procedure, known as tubal ligation, for women in labor, and requirements that doctors provide patients with consent forms in their native language.The coerced sterilizations brought news coverage and protests by women. Here, a 1977 poster advertises a public hearing and rally.Rachael Romero, San Francisco Poster Brigade, 1977We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

He endured skepticism but won a Nobel Prize for his work upending the conventional wisdom that stress, diet or alcohol caused the painful condition.Dr. J. Robin Warren, the Australian pathologist who shared a Nobel Prize for discovering that most stomach ulcers were caused by the bacterium Helicobacter pylori — and not, as had been widely believed, stress, alcohol or spicy foods — died on July 23 in Inglewood, Australia. He was 87.His death, at a care home, was announced by the University of Western Australia in Perth, where he was an emeritus professor for many years. His daughter-in-law Gigi Warren said the cause was complications after a recent fall.In 1984, Dr. Warren and his collaborator, the gastroenterologist Barry Marshall, published a paper in the British medical journal The Lancet describing their finding that the spiral-shaped bacterium now commonly called H. pylori festered in the stomachs of patients with ulcers and gastritis. Dr. Warren had first noticed the bacterium on a gastric biopsy sample in 1979.The paper’s conclusion upended centuries of conventional wisdom about the cause of ulcers. (Psychoanalysts had even written of the “peptic ulcer personality.”) Doctors typically prescribed stress reduction, a bland diet and, starting in 1977, drugs like Tagamet and Zantac to tame the burning acids. Severe cases were sometimes treated with surgery.Dr. Warren, right, with the gastroenterologist Barry Marshall in 1984. When their study of ulcers was published, gastroenterologists expressed concern about whether to trust potentially paradigm-shifting findings made by two unknown researchers in Australia.University of Western AustraliaWhen the study was published, gastroenterologists were skeptical. They expressed concern about whether to trust potentially paradigm-shifting findings made by two unknown researchers in Australia. And the idea that bacteria could even grow in the stomach was considered blasphemy.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

A bioethicist, she pioneered bedside methods for helping patients, their families and doctors deal with anguishing life-or-death decisions in a high-tech age.Nancy Neveloff Dubler, a medical ethicist who pioneered using mediation at hospital bedsides to navigate the complex dynamics among headstrong doctors, anguished family members and patients in their last days, died on April 14 at her home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. She was 82.The cause was heart and lung disease, her family said.A Harvard-educated lawyer who won her college student presidency by campaigning to dissolve the student government, Ms. Dubler was a revolutionary figure in health care who sought, in her words, to “level the playing field” and “amplify nonmedical voices” in knotty medical situations, especially when deciding next steps for the sickest of patients.In 1978, Ms. Dubler founded the Bioethics Consultation Service at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx. Among the first such teams in the country, the service employed lawyers, bioethicists and even philosophers who, like doctors on call, carried pagers alerting them to emergency ethical issues.Modern medical technology, Ms. Dubler wrote in her 1992 book, “lets us take a body with a massive brain hemorrhage, hook it up to a machine, and keep it nominally ‘alive,’ functioning organs on a bed, without hope of recovery.”Harmony Books/Crown Publishers“My colleagues and I spend most of our time working with doctors, nurses, and social workers,” Ms. Dubler wrote with her co-author, David Nimmons, in “Ethics On Call: A Medical Ethicist Shows How to Take Charge of Life-or-death Choices” (1992). “We start where they get stuck, in the web of rights and responsibilities that ensnares all patients and caregivers.”Bioethics consultants emerged as a medical subspecialty following groundbreaking advances in technology, pharmaceuticals and surgical techniques.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

Professor Young’s experiments with prairie voles revealed what poets never could: how the brain processes that fluttering feeling in the heart.Prairie voles are stocky rodents and Olympian tunnellers that surface in grassy areas to feast on grass, roots and seeds with their chisel-shaped teeth, sprouting migraines in farmers and gardeners.But to Larry Young, they were the secret to understanding romance and love.Professor Young, a neuroscientist at Emory University in Atlanta, used prairie voles in a series of experiments that revealed the chemical process for the pirouette of heart-fluttering emotions that poets have tried to put into words for centuries.He died on March 21 in Tsukuba, Japan, where he was helping to organize a scientific conference. He was 56. The cause was a heart attack, his wife, Anne Murphy, said.With their beady eyes, thick tails and sharp claws, prairie voles are not exactly cuddly. But among rodents, they are uniquely domestic: They are monogamous, and the males and females form a family unit to raise their offspring together.“Prairie voles, if you take away their partner, they show behavior similar to depression,” Professor Young told The Atlanta-Journal Constitution in 2009. “It’s almost as if there’s withdrawal from their partner.”That made them ideal for laboratory studies examining the chemistry of love.Males and female prairie voles are known to form a family unit to raise their offspring together.Todd Ahern/Emory University, via Associated PressIn a study published in 1999, Professor Young and his colleagues exploited the gene in prairie voles associated with the signaling of vasopressin, a hormone that modulates social behavior. They boosted vasopressin signaling in meadow voles, which are highly promiscuous.“With their vasopressin receptor levels boosted in this brain region,” Scientific American reported, “these normally solitary and promiscuous voles gained a new propensity to cuddle with a mate.”Headline writers were amused. “Gene Swap Turns Lecherous Mice Into Devoted Mates,” The Ottawa Citizen declared. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram: “Genetic Science Makes Mice More Romantic.” The Independent in London: “‘Perfect Husband’ Gene Discovered.”Professor Young followed up with other prairie vole studies that focused on oxytocin, a hormone that stimulates contractions during childbirth and is involved in the bonding between mothers and newborns.“Because we knew that oxytocin was involved in mother-infant bonding, we explored whether oxytocin might be involved in this partner bonding,” he said in an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in 2019.It was.“If you take two prairie voles, a male and a female, put them together, and this time you don’t let them mate and you just give them a little bit of oxytocin, they will bond,” Professor Young said. “So that was our first set of experiments to show that oxytocin was involved in things other than maternal bonding.”He also injected female prairie voles with a drug that blocks oxytocin, which made them temporarily polygamous.“Love doesn’t really fly in and out,” Professor Young wrote in “The Chemistry Between Us: Love, Sex and the Science of Attraction” (2012, with Brian Alexander). “The complex behaviors surrounding these emotions are driven by a few molecules in our brains. It’s these molecules, acting on defined neural circuits, that so powerfully influence some of the biggest, most life-changing decisions we’ll ever make.”Professor Young always cautioned that prairie voles weren’t humans (obviously). But in the same way that mouse studies have led to medical breakthroughs, he thought his research with prairie voles had intriguing implications.“Perhaps genetic tests for the suitability of potential partners will one day become available, the results of which could accompany, and even override, our gut instincts in selecting the perfect partner,” Professor Young wrote in Nature. He added, “Drugs that manipulate brain systems at whim to enhance or diminish our love for another may not be far away.”In recent years, Professor Young was exploring whether increasing oxytocin in certain conditions would help children with autism who struggle in social interactions.Professor Young in 2021. He became interested in genetics after dissecting a fruit fly in a biochemistry class.Center for Translational Social NeuroscienceLarry James Young was born on June 16, 1967, in Sylvester, a rural town in southwest Georgia. His father, James Young, and his mother, Margaret (Giddens) Young, were peanut farmers.As a child, he had a cow named Bessie.“It was a really rural lifestyle,” Ms. Murphy said. “His aspiration was to go work at the gas station down the street and become a manager.”He attended the University of Georgia on a Pell Grant with plans to become a veterinarian. One day, in biochemistry class, he dissected a fruit fly.“And that’s when he fell in love with genetics and just wanted to figure out the genetic basis of behavior,” Ms. Murphy said. “That’s what drove him the rest of his life.”After graduating in 1989 with a degree in biochemistry, he received a Ph.D. in zoology from the University of Texas at Austin in 1994, and then took a postdoctoral position at Emory. He never left the university, eventually becoming division chief of behavioral neuroscience and psychiatric disorders at the Emory National Primate Research Center.Professor Young married Michelle Willingham in 1985; they later divorced. He married Ms. Murphy in 2002. She is a neuroscientist at Georgia State University in Atlanta.In addition to his wife, he is survived by three daughters from his first marriage, Leigh Anna, Olivia and Savannah Young; two stepsons, Jack and Sam Murphy; a brother, Terry Young; and two sisters, Marcia Young-Whitacre and Robyn Hicks.Professor Young in 2010. He predicted that one day there might be a drug that would increase the urge to fall in love.Emory UniversityAround Emory’s campus, Professor Young was also known as the Love Doctor. He was popular on Valentine’s Day — not just with Ms. Murphy. Reporters around the world would ask him to explain the chemistry of romance.One day, he said, there might even be a drug that would increase the urge to fall in love.“It would be completely unethical to give the drug to someone else,” he told The New York Times, “but if you’re in a marriage and want to maintain that relationship, you might take a little booster shot yourself every now and then.”

Among his accomplishments during a four-decade career in public health, he helped to pioneer programs providing bed nets in Africa.Kent Campbell, an instrumental figure in the global battle against malaria — most notably in Africa, where he led an innovative program providing bed nets to protect rural villagers from the mosquitoes carrying the disease — died on Feb. 20 in Oro Valley, Ariz., a suburb of Tucson. He was 80.His death, in a nursing care facility, was caused by complications of cancer, his children said.As chief of the malaria branch of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from 1981 to 1993, and later as an adviser to UNICEF and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Dr. Campbell is credited with helping to save lives on multiple continents.In Zambia, where he began working on a program with the Gates Foundation in 2005 distributing bed nets and newer antimalarial drugs, malaria cases were cut in half within three years. The program was later expanded to more than 40 other countries in Africa.“His legacy in my country is as one of the people who greatly contributed to the control and prevention of malaria,” Kafula Silumbe, a Zambian public health specialist who worked closely with Dr. Campbell, said in an interview. “It was a collective effort, but he definitely was part of that initial push.”Tall and lanky, with a Southern drawl that revealed his Tennessee upbringing, Dr. Campbell stumbled on what would become a four-decade-long career in public health.In 1972, during his pediatric residency in Boston, he joined the C.D.C. as a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War. Not long after, he was sent to Sierra Leone to help investigate an outbreak of Lassa fever, a virulent hemorrhagic virus.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.