Working inside the government and out, he lobbied to improve the lives of people with H.I.V. and AIDS, particularly those who belonged to minority groups.A. Cornelius Baker, who spent nearly 40 years working with urgency and compassion to improve the lives of people with H.I.V. and AIDS by promoting testing, securing federal funding for research and pushing for a vaccine, died on Nov. 8 at his home in Washington. He was 63.Gregory Nevins, his companion, said the cause was hypertensive atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease.Mr. Baker — who was gay and who tested positive for H.I.V. — became active in Washington in the 1980s, during the early years of the AIDS epidemic. He soon distinguished himself as an eloquent voice for people with H.I.V. and AIDS. A policy wonk and health-care expert, he held positions in the federal government and with nonprofits, including serving as the head of a clinic for the L.G.B.T.Q. community.“He was very kind, very embracing and inclusive — his circles, both professionally and personal, were the most diverse I’ve ever seen, which was driven by his Christian values,” said Douglas M. Brooks, a director of the Office of National AIDS Policy during the Obama administration. “His ferocity appeared when people were marginalized, othered or forgotten.”In 1995, as the executive director of the National Association of People with AIDS, he helped establish June 27 as National H.I.V. Testing Day. “This effort was designed to help reduce the stigma of H.I.V. testing and to normalize it as a component of regular health screening,” Mr. Baker wrote in 2012 on the website of FHI 360, a global health organization for which he served as technical adviser.As an adviser to the National Black Gay Men’s Advocacy Coalition from 2006 to 2014, Mr. Baker worked with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health to help fund research for the care of Black gay men with H.I.V. and AIDS.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.

He conceived many of the techniques and tools that have revolutionized minimally invasive operations and procedures.Dr. George Berci, a Hungarian-born Holocaust survivor who changed the way modern surgery is conducted by developing techniques and instruments that help doctors better see and treat the inside of the body while minimizing cutting, died on Aug. 30 in Thousand Oaks, Calif. He was 103.His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his daughter Katherine DeFevere.Dr. Berci brought a precise eye and an inventor’s zeal to innovations that enabled doctors to better visualize the bladder, colon, esophagus, prostate, common bile duct and other body parts. Until earlier this summer, he was the senior director of minimally invasive surgery research at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, where he had worked since 1969.His innovations were critical to the revolution in minimally invasive endoscopies and laparoscopies, which dramatically reduced the need for surgeons to make large incisions.In endoscopies, doctors use a flexible tube with a light and a camera to examine the upper and lower digestive system. Dr. Berci focused mainly on the area around the throat and vocal cords.In laparoscopies, surgeons place a thin rod with a video camera attached at the end through a small abdominal incision. Carbon dioxide is then used to inflate the space to give doctors enough room to use small instruments to, among other things, remove gallbladders, cysts, tumors, appendixes and spleens; diagnose endometriosis; and repair hernias.Working at a hospital in Melbourne, Australia, Dr. Berci adapted an existing miniaturized television camera, which he attached to an endoscope. It allowed procedures to be shown on monitors so the medical team could work from the screen. One of his early broadcasts was the bronchoscopy of a dog.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 psychiatrist, he ran New York-Presbyterian after a merger, improving patient care, finances and fund-raising to expand its footprint across the region.Dr. Herbert Pardes, a psychiatrist and a former director of the National Institute of Mental Health who brought order to the merger of two major medical centers that became New York-Presbyterian Hospital and ran it for 11 years, died on April 30 at his home in Manhattan. He was 89.His son Steve said the cause was aortic stenosis.Dr. Pardes (pronounced par-diss) was named president and chief executive of the hospital in late 1999, nearly two years after the merger of New York Hospital and Presbyterian Hospital. The previous decade, he had been the dean of the faculty of medicine at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, Presbyterian’s affiliated medical school.“It was no secret that as dean of the medical school I didn’t always agree with the hospital administration,” he said in his thick Bronx accent on CUNY TV in 2011. “I thought maybe I could create a better collaboration by going over to run the hospital.”Dr. Pardes at the entrance of NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center in 2007. He had moved from being dean of a medical faculty to leading a giant medical center and its affiliates.Nicole Bengiveno/The New York TimesThe merger created one of the largest health care institutions in the country, with 2,369 hospital beds, 13,000 employees and $1.6 billion in annual revenue. With 167 facilities, it spread from Manhattan to Rockland and Orange Counties in New York. Its hospitals include the Weill Cornell Medical Center in Manhattan.“It was an amazingly accomplished merger considering the different cultures of the two institutions,” Kenneth E. Raske, president of the Greater New York Hospital Association, a trade group, said in an interview. “He was the bridge that allowed the smooth and wrinkle-free transition of that institution.”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.

Through psychotherapy, recounted in a memoir, he learned that he had 11 personalities, or fractured parts of his identity. One of them told of childhood abuse.Robert B. Oxnam, an eminent China scholar who learned through psychotherapy that his years of erratic behavior could be explained by the torment of having multiple personalities, died on April 18 at his home in Greenport, N.Y., on the North Fork of Long Island. He was 81.His wife, Vishakha Desai, said the cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease.In the 1ate 1980s, Dr. Oxnam was president of the Asia Society, a television commentator and an accomplished sailor. But his psyche was exceedingly frail. He had myriad problems, including intermittent rages, bulimia, memory blackouts and depression, but it was for excessive drinking that he first sought treatment, from Dr. Jeffery Smith, a psychiatrist.The first personality to emerge in that therapy was Tommy, an angry boy, followed by others, like Bobby, an impish teenager, and Baby, who revealed what appeared to have been abuse when Dr. Oxnam was very young.In his 2005 book, “A Fractured Mind: My Life With Multiple Personality Disorder,” Dr. Oxnam recalled the session when Tommy first spoke to Dr. Smith. All that Dr. Oxnam could remember from the 50-minute session, he wrote, was telling the psychiatrist that he didn’t think the therapy was working for him. But Dr. Smith told him that he had been speaking to Tommy all that time.“He’s full of anger,” Dr. Smith told him. “And he’s inside you.”“You’re kidding?” Dr. Oxnam replied.His 11 personalities took up residence inside Dr. Oxnam’s brain and acted out in real life, and nearly all appeared during therapy with Dr. Smith. Wanda had a Buddhist-like presence who was once submerged in the cruel personality known as the Witch. Bobby, who loved Rollerblading with bottles balanced on his head, had an affair with a young woman, a revelation that startled Dr. Oxnam and his wife.In his 2005 memoir, Dr. Oxnam recounted therapy sessions in which his psychiatrist would find himself speaking to one or another of Dr. Oxnam’s multiple personalities. Hachette Books“It can get really noisy in there, a din,” Dr. Oxnam told The New York Times in a profile about him in 2005.Dr. Smith said in an interview, “There was a lot going on in his head, like if one personality was about to do something destructive, another was liable to say, ‘That’s not OK.’”In the book, Dr. Oxnam described how the personalities inhabited a vivid internal world — a castle with rooms, dungeons, walkways and a library behind iron-locked doors. Tommy described the castle to Dr. Smith, telling him it was “Middle Ages-style, standing on a large hill,” and was made of “gray stones and topped with long walkways and towers at the corners.”Dr. Oxnam did not reveal in the book who had abused him. But through Dr. Smith’s conversations with Baby, he wrote, Baby was “crystal clear” that the severe traumas that Robert had experienced as a boy were not inflicted by his parents.“Our vow to hide the abusers’ identity was easier said than done,” Dr. Oxnam wrote. “To be honest, when rage reigns in the Castle, it has been hard to keep quiet. But over time, I have found that withholding the abusers’ names, and refusing to stay in an angry state, actually helps the healing process.”Therapy eventually helped merge the 11 personalities into a more manageable three, he said.Dr. Oxnam with Dr. Jeffery Smith, a psychiatrist who helped identify his multiple personalities, in 2005.Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesMultiple personality disorder — now called dissociative identity disorder — affects about one percent of the population and usually emerges after severe trauma early in life, said Dr. David Spiegel, a professor of psychiatry at the Stanford University School of Medicine. He coined the name change, which appeared in the fifth edition of “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders” (2013).Dr. Spiegel said that the personalities that Dr. Oxnam experienced are better known as fragmentations of his identity.“You’re a different guy talking to me than you are at a party, but there’s a smooth continuity between the two,” he said in an interview. “In people with D.I.D., they experience themselves as different components that get filed into different identities.”The disorder was the basis for the best-selling 1973 book “Sybil,” by Flora Rheta Schreiber, about a woman who was said to have had 16 personalities. It was adapted for a 1976 made-for-television movie starring Sally Field and Joanne Woodward.Robert Bromley Oxnam was born on Dec. 14, 1942, in Los Angeles. His father, also named Robert, was president of Drew University in New Jersey and, before that, the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. His mother, Dalys (Houts) Oxnam, ran the household.He graduated from Williams College in Massachusetts in 1964 with a bachelor’s degree in history. His father urged him to consider graduate work in international studies, and Robert surmised that China would be playing a greater role on the world stage. At Yale University, he earned a master’s degree in East Asian studies in 1966 and a Ph.D. in 1969, with a dissertation on China’s 17th-century Oboi Regency.“For two years, I ferreted through court documents, biographies and local histories, all in classical Chinese, trying to find the patches of historical forest in the midst of dense linguistic trees” on the Oboi Regency, he wrote in 2014 in Perspectives on History, the American Historical Association’s newsmagazine.Dr. Oxnam at his home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in 2005. The artwork was part of a collection of 18th- and 19th-century Japanese wood block prints. He was president of the Asia Society for 11 years. Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesIn 1969, Dr. Oxnam began a six-year run as an associate professor of Chinese and Japanese history at Trinity College in Connecticut before being recruited to the Asia Society, a cultural, educational and research organization in Manhattan. He was the founder of its China Council, which issued papers and briefs about China as it began reopening to the West after President Richard M. Nixon’s visit there in 1972.As director of the society’s Washington center from 1979 to 1981, Dr. Oxnam started the organization’s first contemporary affairs department, to focus on government policy. He was named the society’s president in 1981. Over the next 11 years, he expanded its corporate, contemporary affairs and cultural programming to include 30 Asian countries and helped guide the opening of the Asia Society Hong Kong Center in 1990.Marshall Bouton, a former Asia Society executive, said Dr. Oxnam had helped transform the organization “from a gathering spot for Upper East Siders who were interested in Asia to a more professional organization that dealt with Asia’s most pressing challenges.”Mr. Bouton said that he had not been aware of the full extent of Dr. Oxnam’s alcoholism and that he had had inklings about his behavioral problems. He said that it was remarkable that Dr. Oxnam had been able to work through them.But in 1992, Dr. Oxnam told the society’s board that he was going to resign.“The Bob part of me was touched that they pressured me to reconsider,” he wrote in his book. But he left.In addition to his wife, whom he married in 1993 and who was president of the Asia Society from 2004 to 2012, his survivors include his daughter, Deborah Betsch, and his son, Geoff Oxnam, both from his marriage to Barbara Foehl, which ended in divorce in 1993, and four grandchildren.After leaving the Asia Society, Dr. Oxnam hosted and wrote a series about China for “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour” on PBS in 1993; taught a graduate seminar on U.S.-Asia relations at Beijing University from 2003 to 2004 (where his Bobby personality lectured in Chinese), and advised the Bessemer Trust, a wealth management firm.He also wrote “Ming: A Novel of Seventeenth-Century China” (1995) and turned to art, crafting found wood into sculptures inspired by Chinese philosophy and taking photographs of glacial rocks.“In Chinese tradition, the term ‘qi’ has many meanings, but for me, it means an invisible but palpable source of creative energy,” Dr. Oxnam told Hamptons Art Hub, an online publication, in 2018. He added, “I have suffered from dissociation all my life, but somehow the linkage between ‘qi’ and art has given me focus and hope.”

They were distinct people who pursued different lives. “Get past this already, everybody,” Lori said, “get past it and learn to know the individual person.”Lori and George Schappell, conjoined twins whose skulls were partly fused but who managed to lead independent lives, died on April 7 in Philadelphia. They were 62.Their death, at a hospital, was announced by a funeral home, which did not cite a cause.Dr. Christopher Moir, a professor of surgery at the Mayo Clinic, who has been on teams that separated six sets of conjoined twins — although none of them were joined at the head — said that when one of the Schappells died, the other would have almost certainly followed quickly.“Conjoined twins share circulation, he said, “so unless you somehow emergently divide their connection, it’s absolutely a fatal, nonviable process.”The Schappells lived much longer than had been expected when they were born as craniopagus twins, joined at the head, which is rare. They were cited as the second-oldest conjoined twins ever by Guinness World Records.They were connected at the sides of their foreheads and looked in opposite directions. Lori was able-bodied and pushed George, who had spina bifida, on a stool that had wheels. George was born female and changed her name in the 1990s to Reba, for the country singer Reba McEntire, but later identified as a trans male.The conjoined twins Lori, left, and George Schappell in 2003.John A. Secoges/Reading Eagle, via Associated PressWe 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 and his wife wrote pioneering studies; he used the term “coercion control” to describe psychological and physical dominance by abusers.Evan Stark, who studied domestic violence with his wife and then pioneered a concept called “coercive control,” which describes the psychological and physical domination that abusers use to punish their partners, died on March 18 at his home in Woodbridge, Conn. He was 82.His wife, Dr. Anne Flitcraft, said the cause was most likely a heart attack that occurred while he was on a Zoom call with women’s advocates in British Columbia.Through studies that began in 1979, Drs. Stark and Flitcraft became experts in intimate partner violence, sounding an alarm that battering — not car accidents or sexual assault — was the largest cause of injury that sent women to emergency rooms.But by talking to battered women as well as veterans who had experienced post-traumatic stress disorder from their treatment in the military, Dr. Stark began to understand that coercive control was a strategy that included violence but that also involved threats of beatings, isolating female victims from friends and family and cutting off their access to money, food, communication and transportation.“Like assaults, coercive control undermines a victim’s physical and psychological integrity,” he wrote in “Coercive Control: The Entrapment of Women in Personal Life” (2007). “But the main means used to establish control is the micro-regulation of everyday behaviors associated with stereotypic female roles, such as how women dress, cook, clean, socialize, care for their children or perform sexually.”Dr. Stark started a forensic social work practice in 1990 — a year later, he earned a master’s of social work degree from Fordham University — and began to testify for victims in courts.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.

Known as Dr. Max (he was not a medical doctor. but had a Ph.D. in neuroscience), he reported on health and science with an easygoing gravitas.Max Gomez, an award-winning medical and science journalist who delivered informed reports for more than 40 years on TV stations in New York and Philadelphia, most recently during the Covid-19 pandemic, died on Sept. 2 at his home in Manhattan. He was 72.His partner, Amy Levin, said the cause was head and neck cancer, with which he had been diagnosed four years ago.Billed as “Dr. Max,” he brought an easygoing gravitas to reporting on subjects like vaccinations, knee replacements, prostate cancer, colonoscopies, sickle cell anemia and, when he himself contracted them, Lyme disease and the MRSA infection. One of his reports on Alzheimer’s disease focused on his father, a physician, who was swindled as his memory abandoned him.Dr. Gomez had been chief medical correspondent at WCBS, Channel 2, in New York City since 2007 and made his last appearance there in March 2022. He also worked at WNBC, Channel 4, and WNEW, Channel 5 (now WNYW), as well as KYW, Channel 3, in Philadelphia.“What he did best was to care deeply and combine that with being able to explain complex things so well that regular folks could understand them,” Dan Forman, a former managing editor of the Channel 2 news department, said by phone. “And he would activate it by helping viewers find the help they needed.”Dr. Gomez won seven local Emmy Awards in New York and two in Philadelphia, and some of his work was seen nationally, on the CBS News program “48 Hours” and on NBC News. He was also a semifinalist in NASA’s journalist-in-space program, which was suspended indefinitely after the shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986, and a co-author of three books, among them “Cells Are the New Cure: The Cutting-Edge Medical Breakthroughs That Are Transforming Our Health” (2017, with Dr. Robin L. Smith).He was a regular presence on Channel 2 from the start of the pandemic, when there were very few diagnosed Covid cases in the United States. For two years, as he dealt with cancer, he explained the medical issues facing viewers; showed how the coronavirus mutates; and sorted through infection data and studies.He was not a medical doctor — he had a doctorate in neuroscience — and he and the stations where he worked were sometimes criticized for referring to him as Dr. Max Gomez. “Max doesn’t tell people he’s an M.D., nor do we,” Paula Walker, then an assistant news director at Channel 4, told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1991. “In our estimation, he’s probably more informed than the average health reporter.”Mr. Gomez in the studio of WCBS-TV in New York. He was a regular presence on the station from the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.via Gomez familyMaximo Marcelino Gomez III was born on Aug. 9, 1951, in Havana and moved to Miami with his family three years later. His father was an obstetrician and gynecologist; his mother, Concepción (Nespral) Gomez, worked for Cubana Airlines, Cuba’s national carrier, and later for Avianca, the largest airline in Colombia.After graduating from Princeton University in 1973 with a bachelor’s degree in geosciences, Dr. Gomez earned a Ph.D. in neuroscience from the Wake Forest University School of Medicine in 1978. He then became a National Institutes of Health postdoctoral fellow at Rockefeller University in Manhattan.While studying there, he chose not to pursue a career in research or academia, but rather to look for work in the media that would make use of his scientific background.“When I first decided to go after television, it was because I thought that if I didn’t, 20 years from now I’d be saying, ‘What if?’” he told The Philadelphia Daily News in 1985.He added: “Why television? Well, if I said money and ego aren’t part of it, then I’d be lying to you or to myself.”He contacted Mark Monsky, the news director of Channel 5’s “10 O’Clock News,” who gave him a one-month tryout in July 1980 that turned into a four-year stay. While there, Dr. Gomez was one of the first television reporters to focus on the AIDS crisis, according to Ms. Levin, who was then a producer at the station.Dr. Gomez moved to KYW in late 1984 and stayed there for six years. While there, he received an award from United Press International for his documentary on AIDS. He later received an award from New York City’s health department for his coverage of the 9/11 attacks while he was working for Channel 4.“Fear and anxiety levels were out of control in the city, but we were spending the first 20 minutes of every broadcast scaring the living daylights out of people,” he said in an interview in 2016 for the newsletter of CaringKind, an nonprofit Alzheimer’s caregiving organization, “and then, as my news director said, at the end of the show, I had 90 seconds to talk them off the ledge.”He moved to Channel 2 in 1994 and returned to Channel 4 in 1997 where, after nearly a decade, he was let go when the station cut costs. He came back to Channel 2 in 2007.In addition to Ms. Levin, Dr. Gomez is survived by a daughter, Katie Gomez; a son, Max IV; and a brother, George. His marriage to SuElyn Charnesky ended in divorce.In the 1985 Philadelphia Daily News interview, Dr. Gomez said that he viewed his role seriously: Being on television, he said, gave him credibility and a major responsibility.“I feel I owe it to people to be their first filter,” he said. “So if I’m talking about a health cure, I want to know where has this information been published. I present the best product I can. I know that it’s scientifically accurate.”

He lived with the condition also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease much longer than most and spread the message, an admirer said, that disability was “just a different way of living.”Long after being diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, better known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, Robert Paulson published his autobiography. He could not move by then, much less type, so he created the book in four months from his wheelchair by employing a text-generating device that uses the eye as a cursor to select letters.“A million clicks of his eye,” his wife, Maureen (Dowling) Paulson, said in a phone interview. “He got pretty proficient at it.”In his book, “Not in Kansas Anymore: A Memoir of the Farm, New York City and Life with A.L.S.” (2009), Mr. Paulson wrote, “The diagnosis of this disease need not be a death sentence.”Later in the book, he observed: “Life is everything. And what is it but the ability to feel, think and communicate? Thanks to today’s technologies, A.L.S. can’t take any of these from you.”Mr. Paulson, who spoke through a speech synthesizer, built a public profile as a face of A.L.S. with his book, with interviews he gave and with appearances he made, with his wife, before audiences including students at Sacred Heart University, in Fairfield, Conn., and prisoners at Rikers Island. His messages, Mrs. Paulson said, centered on resilience and coping when “terrible things come your way.”“He’d say, ‘It rains on all of us,’” she added. “It was a good message for kids to hear.”Mr. Paulson spoke in 2018 to a disabilities studies course taught by Allan B. Goldstein at the New York University Tandon School of Engineering.“What he brought was the knowledge that disability was not a tragedy, that it’s just a different way of living,” Mr. Goldstein said by phone. “And they got that viscerally.”Kailey Blount, who attended a disability and literature class at Sacred Heart at which Mr. Paulson appeared, said that he helped her cope with the effects of ulcerative colitis. “In a time where I was frozen by disability,” she said by email, “Mr. Paulson lit a path forward. His brilliant mind, kind heart and dignified soul guided me towards a brighter future.”Mr. Paulson died on Aug. 8 at his home in Manhattan, his wife said, 30 years after he experienced the first symptoms of the disease to which he finally succumbed. He was 86.With the aid of crucial interventions at various points after his diagnosis — including a tracheotomy, a ventilator and a feeding tube — Mr. Paulson lived an unusually long time with the disease. The average survival time is three years, according to the A.L.S. Association, and only 5 percent of people with the disease live 20 years or longer. The physicist Stephen Hawking was an outlier: He was diagnosed with A.L.S. at age 21, and he survived with it until his death in 2018, 55 years later.Robert Edward Paulson was born on June 27, 1937, in his mother’s bedroom on his family’s wheat, soybean and alfalfa farm in Lindsborg, Kan., a small city founded by Swedish settlers. His father, Nils, died before Bob turned 2. His mother, Ellen (Karlsson) Paulson, who had immigrated from Sweden, took over the running of the farm after her husband’s death.“It was up to my three older brothers and me to scratch out a living as we grew up,” Mr. Paulson told the website of Bridging Voice, an organization that helps people with neurodegenerative disorders communicate through training and equipment, in 2021. “My childhood was all grit and dogged determination.”Bob hated farming, so he followed the example of his brother Arnold, a nuclear engineer. He studied nuclear engineering at Kansas State University and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1959. The coach of his debate team there suggested that, given his ability to deliver an argument, he would make a good lawyer.He attended Georgetown Law School at night while working on classified matters during the day at the United States Atomic Energy Commission (which was later split into two agencies, one of them the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, in 1974). He graduated in 1963.With his background in science, he specialized in patent law.“My life as an attorney, before A.LS., entailed standing up and speaking in federal court,” he told Bridging Voice. “I used my voice in every part of the law.” He also sang in opera workshops, glee clubs and church choirs.But his ability to stand, speak and sing began to erode in the 1990s, as his fingers, arms, legs and stomach muscles weakened. He went from using a cane to a walker and, in 1998, to a wheelchair. But he continued to work as a partner at Morgan & Finnegan, an intellectual property law firm in Manhattan, for five more years. He stopped when he could no longer use his limbs and keep up with the billing.In late 2003, when pneumonia led to the failure of his lungs, he required a tracheotomy and breathing and feeding tubes. “I can do this, I’m already in a wheelchair,” he recalled of his reaction to the latest change in the state of his health when he was interviewed a few years later by the Muscular Dystrophy Association’s A.L.S. division.He adjusted over the next 20 years, with help from his wife; his sons, Joshua, Luke and James; and others. He started his own patent law firm, with a client list that included the United States Chamber of Commerce; wrote his autobiography; and compiled a synopsis of more than 200 decisions in trademark and copyright law from 2013 to 2020.In addition to his wife, Mr. Paulson is survived by his sons, four grandchildren and his brother Arnold.Mrs. Paulson said that despite his condition, her husband retained a largely positive disposition.“He was willing to face the day,” she said. “He’d wake up, maybe you’d see a few tears in his eyes, but he’d charge ahead. I’d get him in the wheelchair, and off we’d go.”

She was one of hundreds of people, all of them Ashkenazi Jews, whose good health and cognitive ability at extreme old age were the subject of genetic research.Louise Levy, who along with hundreds of others 95 and older was part of study to understand how their genetic makeup led to their good physical and cognitive health during extremely long lives, died on July 17 in Greenwich, Conn. She was 112.Her daughter, Lynn Neidorf, confirmed the death, at a hospital. She said Mrs. Levy had broken a hip two months ago but, after surgery and rehabilitation that had her moving with a walker, had developed an infection that weakened her.At her death she was one of the world’s six living supercentenarians, people who have lived into a 12th decade, according to the Los Angeles-based Gerontology Research Group.“She was a light of positivity,” Ms. Neidorf, who is in her 70s, said by phone. “She had that quality babies have: People were drawn to her. They wanted to be around her.”Mrs. Levy lived independently in a senior living community in Rye, N.Y, until two years ago, during the pandemic, when she moved into its assisted living facility.When she celebrated her birthday last year, she told The Rye Record, “I’m glad I can still speak and have my sense of humor, but I would caution you not to try and live to be 112!”She had been the oldest known living person in New York State, according to LongeviQuest, which maintains a database of supercentenarians.Mrs. Levy was one of more than 700 people, all 95 or older, recruited since 1998 to participate in a study by the Institute for Aging Research at the Albert Einstein School of Medicine in the Bronx to learn the genetic reasons for their unusually long, healthy lives.“It’s not luck,” Dr. Nir Barzilai, an endocrinologist who directs the institute, said by phone. “They exceeded luck. The biggest answer is genetics.”Using the blood and plasma of the test group, all Ashkenazi Jews — a comparatively homogeneous population whose genetic variations are easier to spot — the institute’s Longevity Genes Project has discovered gene mutations that are believed to be responsible for slowing the impact of aging on people like Mrs. Levy and protecting them against high cholesterol, heart disease, diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease.“The most striking thing about them is they had a contraction of morbidity,” Dr. Barzilai said. “They are sick, as a group, for very little time at the end of their lives.”He added, “Did they do what we know we should do — exercise, diet and sleep and have social connectivity? The answer is mostly no. Sixty percent were smoking. Less than 50 percent did much household activity or biking. Fifty percent were overweight or obese. Less than three percent were vegetarians. So they weren’t special in that sense.”The goal of the research is the development of drugs that would imitate what the centenarians’ genes do to protect their health.Louise Morris Wilk was born on Nov. 1, 1910, in Cleveland. Her father, Louis, was a photographer and a movie theater manager. Her mother, Mollie (Morris) Wilk, was a homemaker. The three later moved to New York City, where Louis illustrated film posters.Louise in 1918, not long before the end of World War I.via Levy FamilyLouise attended but did not graduate from Hunter College. In 1939, she married Seymour Levy, who sold housewares for a company founded by his father. He later took over the company, and Mrs. Levy became his office manager when he moved the business into their house in Larchmont, N.Y.She continued to work into her 90s for the man who acquired the company after her husband died in 1991.“Not full time, you know — two, three days a week for an hour or two until my car conked out,” she told WCBS Radio in 2019.Mrs. Levy did not have heart disease, diabetes or Alzheimer’s disease but was treated for breast cancer and smoked cigarettes for decades, until 1965, when the U.S. Surgeon General put health warnings on cigarette packs.Even as her hearing, eyesight and mobility diminished, she stayed active with stretching classes, playing bridge and knitting sweaters for hospitalized babies. She began losing her short-term memory only in the last six months.Mrs. Levy believed that her low-cholesterol diet, positive attitude and daily glass of red wine contributed to her extended good health. “Everybody says ‘good genes,’” she told the Canadian newspaper The National Post in 2012, “but I don’t think it’s good genes.”She may have been onto something.“There is more than one way to get to 100,” Dr. Barzilai said, “but some of them are genes that are related to cholesterol.”In addition to her daughter, Mrs. Levy is survived by her son, Ralph, who is also in his 70s, four grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.Ms. Neidorf, who believes her own good health may be tied to the same genetic makeup as her mother’s, recalled that the two were nonetheless different types of people.“I was much more fresh and disobedient than she was,” Ms. Neidorf recalled. “She was sugar and spice and everything nice. I held her in great admiration because she never tried to make me be like her. She accepted who I was and believed in me.”

A lifelong protester, he became a leading promoter of organic food and a forceful critic of a food industry that genetically engineers what it produces and sells.Ronnie Cummins, a ponytailed activist who became one of the country’s leading advocates for organic food and a leading critic of genetically modified food, died on April 26 in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, where he lived and worked part-time. He was 76.Rose Welch, his wife and partner in starting the Organic Consumers Association, an advocacy and informational organization, said his death, which was not widely reported at the time, was caused by bone and lymph cancer.Mr. Cummins was a lifelong activist and protester, beginning with his opposing the Vietnam War and nuclear power. He settled on organic food activism in the 1990s after he was hired as a director of the Pure Food Campaign, a lobbying group that sought to broaden awareness of the dangers of genetically engineered food while pushing for responsible labeling and government testing.Mr. Cummins worked in the field for the campaign, raising alarm at rallies and supermarkets about the perils of foods using genetically modified ingredients. He handed out leaflets, wrote opinion articles and answered consumers’ questions as a campaign spokesman.He also worked for the Beyond Beef campaign, aimed at reducing beef consumption and promoting safer methods of cattle production. Both campaigns were founded by the environmental activist and social theorist Jeremy Rifkin.Mr. Cummins “was a tough guy who could be an activist and also step back and do the intellectual homework behind what we were doing,” Mr. Rifkin said in a phone interview.“Too often activists burn out after starting out with high expectations,” he added. “But Ronnie could write, research, reflect and be open to all points of view.”One of Mr. Cummins’s frequent targets was recombinant bovine somatotropin, or bovine growth hormone, a genetically engineered hormone, produced by Monsanto, that stimulates milk production in cows.On the first day that farmers were allowed to sell milk from cows injected with the hormone, in 1994, Mr. Cummins told The Associated Press that “if we don’t slow down the technology of change with genetically engineered additives, we will be making a very major mistake in terms of human health, animal health and the survival of family farms.”He continued to rail about milk produced by hormone-treated cows after he and Ms. Welch started the Organic Consumers Association, based in Finland, Minn., in 1998.“Recombinant bovine growth hormone is bad for dairy cows, literally burning them out in three or four years, causing terrible physical stress and a long list of medical problems including reproductive complications,” Mr. Cummins wrote in The Fresno Bee in 2008.He relished battling with major brands. In 2001, he raised doubt about Starbucks’s promise not to use milk products with the hormone by asking to see its promise in writing. (The company eventually complied in 2007.) He warned about a “sneak attack engineered by the likes of Kraft, Dean Foods and Smucker’s.” To pressure companies using modified beet sugar, he threatened a protest against Hershey.Though there are unresolved questions about the effect of genetically modified organisms on biodiversity, there is a near-universal consensus among scientists that genetically modified foods are safe to eat.Most consumers do not share that view, however, a skepticism due in large part to the efforts of activists like Mr. Cummins.The safety of genetically modified food “is like global climate change, where 99 percent of scientists believe in it,” Pamela Ronald, a plant pathology professor at the University of California, Davis, told The Roanoke Times in 2013.She added, “You have scientists around the world who say genetically engineered crops are safe to eat — and then you have Ronnie Cummins.”Mr. Cummins fought for years for a labeling requirement on genetically modified food. But when Congress passed one in 2016, he considered it a victory only for food manufacturers and biotech companies.Derek Montgomery for The New York TimesMr. Cummins was born Adrian Alton Abel on Oct. 28, 1946, in Jefferson, Tex., about 20 miles from the Louisiana border. His father, Jack, was an accountant for Gulf Oil in Port Arthur, Texas, in the heart of the state’s oil industry. His mother, Elise (Stout) Abel, was a homemaker who died by suicide in 1951.In his 20s, Adrian changed his name to Ronnie Cummins, the name of a boy who was also born in 1946 and who died in 1954. Ms. Welch said he changed his name because he feared reprisals from the Ku Klux Klan for his antiwar activities at Rice University in Houston, where he had majored in English and philosophy and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1969.Ms. Welch said she did not know why her husband took the Cummins boy’s name in particular. She said he told her that he did not have a criminal record that he was seeking to hide with a new identity. His brother, Jack Abel Jr., said by phone that the story behind the name change “is so personal I can’t share it.”In addition to his wife and brother, Mr. Cummins is survived by his son, Adrian Cummins Welch; and his sisters, Molly Travis and Bonnie Abel.Adrian grew up among refineries and later recalled catching fish polluted by oil. But he also spent idyllic summers on his maternal grandparents’ farm, where he took care of animals and gathered eggs.“My life experience has taught me that money rules and power corrupts, and that putting profits before people and environmental health is not only wrong but deadly,” he wrote in his book “Grassroots Rising: A Call to Action on Climate, Farming, Food and Green New Deal” (2020). “Organized grass-roots power can make a big difference,” he added, “whether we’re talking about public consciousness, marketplace pressure or politics and public policy.”As a career, activism didn’t pay the bills, so he earned a living over the years as a newsstand owner at the University of Minnesota, the director of a food co-op in Burnsdale, Minn., outside Minneapolis, and a house painter. Ms. Welch waited tables.“He was pretty much a hippie,” she said in a phone interview.Both went to work for Mr. Rifkin in the 1990s, Mr. Cummins as a director, Ms. Welch as a campaign manager. They left to start the Organic Consumers Association, which supports enforcement of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s organic food standards, produces educational material for organic consumers and businesses, and encourages public pressure campaigns on organic food issues.The “hippie” was finally earning a real salary — $112,900 in 2021.The O.C.A. has spun off two organizations: the Mexico-based Via Orgánica, an agroecology farm school and research center, in 2009, and, in 2014, Regeneration International, which advances ways to develop farming practices that rebuild degraded soil.In the view of André Leu, the international director of Regeneration International, Mr. Cummins had stood up to “the powerful elite who were monopolizing power and wealth” and were “undermining democracy, fair wages, healthy food, peace, the climate, and the environment.”A longtime goal of Mr. Cummins’s was for the government to require labeling on genetically modified food. He fought for ballot initiatives in several states and won his first major victory in Vermont, in 2014, when it became the first state to pass a labeling law.Faced with the prospect of a patchwork of state laws, Congress passed a sweeping federal labeling law in 2016.But Mr. Cummins did not consider it a victory.The law, which superseded the tougher Vermont legislation, gave companies the option of using an icon or a scannable QR code that would direct consumers to a website, instead of having to spell out the information on the package. And some foods, like highly refined sugars and oils, were exempt from the labeling requirement.Mr. Cummins, in an article on his website, called brands like Organic Valley and Stonyfield Farms “organic traitors” and accused the Grocery Manufacturers Association, the Whole Foods supermarket chain “and a cabal of sellout, nonprofit organizations” of surrendering “to Monsanto and a corporate agribusiness” by backing the legislation.“In other words business as usual,” he added, then used a buzzword for genetically modified products — “Shut up and eat your Frankenfoods.”Sheelagh McNeill