In 1956, when he began working with a small group in a Boston laboratory, measles was a major threat. Seven years later, lifesaving immunizations began.Dr. Samuel L. Katz, a virologist who was part of the research team at Harvard Medical School that developed the measles vaccine, an advance more than half a century ago that has saved countless lives, died on Monday at his home in Chapel Hill, N.C. He was 95.His son David confirmed the death.Dr. Katz later enhanced the reputation of the pediatrics department at the Duke University School of Medicine as its chairman.Dr. Katz took up the fight against measles in 1956, when he joined a laboratory at Children’s Hospital Medical Center (now Boston Children’s Hospital) run by Dr. John Enders. Two years earlier, Dr. Enders had shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering how to grow the polio virus in cultures, a breakthrough that was critical to Jonas Salk’s development of a polio vaccine, which led to widespread successful immunizations.Dr. Enders’s lab had already isolated the measles virus from a 13-year-old boy when Dr. Katz arrived there as a research fellow. Measles was a major medical threat at the time: In the decade before the vaccine was made available in 1963, nearly every child in the United States had measles by age 15, with three to four million people infected by it every year, leading to an estimated 400 to 500 deaths annually, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.Worldwide, measles killed 2.6 million people a year before the availability of vaccines, the World Health Organization said.“I was put to work with a visitor from Yugoslavia, Milan Milovanovic, who taught me a lot of practical, at-the-bench work,” Dr. Katz told Dartmouth Medicine, an alumni magazine, in 2009. “We worked together on adapting the virus to different cell systems and to eggs and eventually to chick embryo cells” — a process that led to the weakening of the virus so it could stimulate an immune response without causing serious side effects.Dr. Katz was involved in inoculating rhesus monkeys with the virus.“And when we put the chick virus into monkeys, they didn’t develop viremia” — a virus in the blood — “they didn’t develop fever, they didn’t develop any sort of nasal congestion or conjunctivitis or rash, they were perfectly fine,” he said on the podcast “Open Forum Infectious Diseases” in 2014. “But they developed antibodies.”The chick virus was injected into students at a state school for children with neurological and central nervous system problems, a group whose use by the lab reflected a time of looser ethical standards about test subjects.“At the end of several weeks, they had antibodies to the measles virus,” Dr. Katz recalled.He became a research associate in the lab in 1958 and kept that title for the next decade, during which he was also a pediatrician at Children’s Hospital and Beth Israel Hospital in Boston and an assistant professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School.Dr. Katz played two other notable roles in the development of the measles vaccine. In one, he worked with pharmaceutical firms that wanted to manufacture a vaccine.“He was forever sending vials of the viruses to Merck and other companies,” I. George Miller Jr., a professor of pediatrics at the Yale School of Medicine, who joined the lab in 1961, said in a phone interview. “He was kind of the Good Humor man for vaccines.”In the other role, at the request of a British pediatrician, David Morley, Dr. Katz brought a prototype vaccine to Nigeria in 1961 to immunize children who were highly susceptible to measles because their systems had been weakened by malaria, intestinal worms, vitamin A deficiency and protein depletion.Nigerian parents were accustomed to losing their children to measles; they had a mortality rate of 5 to 15 percent if they got the virus. While there, Dr. Katz recalled on the “Open Forum” podcast, he heard people say, “You don’t count your children until the measles has passed.”He vaccinated children in a village there, and they developed immunity.The measles vaccine was licensed in 1963 and soon became widely available; eight years later, it was incorporated into the combined measles, mumps and rubella vaccine.Dr. Katz at the Duke University children’s hospital. He was chairman of the Duke medical school’s pediatrics department for 22 years and continued to teach there for seven years after stepping down as chairman in 1990. via Duke UniversitySamuel Lawrence Katz was born on May 29, 1927, in Manchester, N.H. His father, Morris, was a railroad executive; his mother, Ethel (Lawrence) Katz, was a homemaker.He entered Dartmouth College in 1944, hoping to become a journalist. His interest changed to medicine a year later, when he enlisted in the Navy and was sent to hospital training school in San Diego.He returned to Dartmouth after the war and earned a bachelor’s degree in political science in 1948. He also took the pre-med courses required to enter Dartmouth’s medical school, a two-year school then. He graduated with a bachelor’s in medical science in 1950 and from Harvard Medical School in 1952.After interning at Beth Israel, he was a resident at Children’s Hospital, a teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School. While there, he witnessed a polio outbreak in the summer of 1955, the year the Salk vaccine became available.He worked in the hospital’s polio wards that summer, seeing the disease’s devastation firsthand. When the crisis eased, he asked for permission to work with Dr. Enders.“All the time we were working in the lab — with viruses, with cell cultures, with blood specimens, with potential vaccines,” Dr. Katz said on the podcast, Dr. Enders “would give these materials to anyone that visited the lab who was a legitimate investigator.”Dr. Katz left Harvard for the Duke University School of Medicine in 1968. As chairman of its pediatrics department for 22 years, he helped raise its national standing.“He had such a command of virology and clinical practice and was engaging in a very positive way,” Dr. Mary Klotman, dean of the Duke medical school, said in a phone interview. “He was a role model for the integration of science, clinical care and mentoring the next generation of clinicians.”Dr. Katz stepped down from running the Duke pediatrics department in 1990 to work with his second wife, Dr. Catherine Wilfert, an H.I.V./AIDS researcher and activist and professor of pediatrics at the Duke medical school. She was the principal investigator in a pediatric AIDS clinical trial, beginning in 1987, that showed the efficacy of using the drug AZT to reduce the incidence of mother-to-child transmission of H.I.V. by over 60 percent.Dr. Wilfert left Duke in 1996 and became scientific director of the Elizabeth Glazer Pediatric AIDS Foundation. Dr. Katz continued to teach at Duke until retiring in 1997.In addition to his son David, he is survived by two other sons, John and William; five daughters, Deborah Miora, Susan Calderon, Penelope Katz Fischer, Rachel Wilfert and Katie Regen; and 17 grandchildren. His marriage to Betsy Cohan ended in divorce. His marriage to Dr. Wilfert ended with her death in 2020. His son Samuel Jr. died in 1980.Dr. Katz became a renowned advocate for vaccines. He was chairman of the C.D.C.’s advisory committee on immunization practices from 1985 to 1993 and the recipient of the 2003 Albert B. Sabin Gold Medal, which is given to public health leaders who save lives through vaccines. The medal is named for the doctor who developed the oral polio vaccine.“He was someone you could count on for intellectual rigor, who never panicked and wanted to do what was best in the field,” Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine, said in an interview. He added, “I’m sure he would have conniptions over the anti-vaccine activism causing people to refuse the Covid vaccine.”

Feeling jittery about math — and altogether avoiding it — “is a serious handicap” that often affected women, she wrote in Ms. magazine in 1976, followed by a book on the subject.When Sheila Tobias finished her freshman year at Radcliffe College in 1954, her professor in a natural sciences course congratulated her on her performance. But for many years she was troubled that he had not encouraged her to take more science classes. When she finally asked him, he said that her limited science background had already made her ineligible for a science career.“I think everything I have done since then originated in the thrill of that course and in the door closing through no fault of my own,” she told Physics Today magazine in 2020. “I had to become a feminist and meet women like myself who were thwarted in their careers.”That experience inspired her two decades later to explore what she called “math anxiety”: the jitters that made smart students, mostly females, avoid mathematics as it became increasingly difficult. She wrote about the concept in 1976 in Ms. magazine in an article that Gloria Steinem, a leader of the women’s movement and a founder of the publication, considered “one of the most important pieces we’ve ever published,” as she put it in an interview with the Arizona newspaper The Tucson Citizen in 2007.“She described for the first time that there is no more a math mind than there is a history mind,” Ms. Steinem was quoted as saying. “It is just that people learn in different ways.”In the Ms. article, Ms. Tobias wrote: “Math anxiety is a serious handicap. It is handed down from mother to daughter with father’s amused indulgence. (‘Your mother could never balance a checkbook,’ he says fondly.) Then, when a colleague recognizes it in an employee, she can be barred from any endeavor or new assignment by the threat that the new job will involve some work with ‘data or tables or functions.’”Ms. Tobias, who expanded the article into a book, “Overcoming Math Anxiety” (1978), died on July 6, 2021, in a nursing home in Tucson. She was 86. Her death was not widely reported at the time; it was recently brought to the attention of The New York Times by the author and journalist Clara Bingham, who learned of it while seeking to interview Ms. Tobias for an oral history project about the women’s liberation movement.Ms. Tobias expanded a 1976 article in Ms. magazine into a 1978 book. “Math anxiety is a serious handicap,” she wrote. “It is handed down from mother to daughter with father’s amused indulgence.”Ms. Tobias’s stepdaughter, Mari Tomizuka, said the cause was complications of a subdural hematoma resulting from a fall.Ms. Tobias is also survived by her stepsons Frank, David and John Tomizuka and 13 step-grandchildren. Her marriage to Carl Tomizuka, a physicist, ended with his death in 2017. Together they wrote “Breaking the Science Barrier: How to Explore and Understand the Sciences” (1992). A previous marriage, to Carlos Stern, ended in divorce.Ms. Tobias became an associate provost at Wesleyan University in 1970, the year women were admitted to its freshman class for the first time since 1909. Soon after, she began studying the transcripts of female students and noticed a disturbing pattern: They were avoiding math, or any other major that required a knowledge of math, like physics, chemistry or economics.“Smart, ambitious college girls were just ‘sliding off the quantitative,’” she told Physics Today.In 1975, Ms. Tobias opened a clinic to deal with math anxiety at Wesleyan and recalled writing math symbols on a blackboard and asking students, “Do these look hostile to you?”Although math anxiety affected men as well, Ms. Tobias found, she framed it as a feminist issue at a time when the women’s movement was in the forefront.“I was talking about math as an example of the feminist term ‘learned helplessness,’” she told Physics Today, “and how men were keeping us out of power because the learned helplessness disabled us from competing at full tilt.”Sheila Tobias was born on April 26, 1935, in Brooklyn to Paul and Rose (Steinberger) Tobias.After receiving a bachelor’s degree in history and literature at Radcliffe in 1957, she worked as a journalist in Germany. She received her master’s in history from Columbia University in 1961 and worked in print and television journalism. Cornell University appointed her assistant to the vice president of academic affairs in 1967.That same year she helped organize a Cornell conference on women that was attended by Betty Friedan, author of “The Feminine Mystique” (1963). Ms. Tobias also taught a women’s studies course, believed to be one of the first in the country.She left Cornell to join Wesleyan in 1970 and stayed there for eight years. She also became a consultant to math departments at colleges and an author (with Peter Goudinoff, Stefan Leader and Shelah Leader) of a book about that sought to demystify the military: “What Kinds of Guns Are They Buying for Your Butter? A Guide to Defense, Weaponry and Military Spending” (1982).“The appeal is to sweet reason, not to fear, outrage, anger or chauvinism,” Judith Stiehm wrote about the book in the journal Quarterly Report on Women and the Military. “With the publication of this volume, all of us have lost our excuses; each of us can be easily armed for debate.”In her research on math anxiety Ms. Tobias discovered that many college students had a similar fear of science. That led to the book “They’re Not Dumb, They’re Different: Stalking the Second Tier” (1990), written while she worked for the Research Corporation in Tucson. The book explored why students abandon science for other subjects. As part of her research, she paid liberal arts graduate students to take first-year chemistry and physics courses at the University of Arizona and the University of Nebraska and to take notes on their experiences.“What they found was that most courses remain unapologetically competitive, selective and intimidating,” she told The Hartford Courant in 1991, and “there was little attempt to create a sense of community among average students of science.”She found that some students — men and women — were turned off by science because, they said, too much time was spent studying formulas without knowing why they were learning them. Others said science courses failed to connect what they were learning with the larger world.Ms. Tobias in 2015. At Cornell, she taught what was believed to be one of the first women’s studies course in the country.Balfour WalkerMs. Tobias lectured on war and peace studies at the University of Southern California; on women’s studies at the University of California, San Diego; and on history at the City College of New York. She wrote several more books about science as well as “Faces of Feminism: An Activist’s Reflection on the Women’s Movement” (1997). She was also a top official of the organization Veteran Feminists of America.“She was very strong and forthright,” Alison Hughes, a former director of the Center for Rural Health at the University of Arizona, said in a phone interview. “She had a brilliant mind — she challenged everything.”Muriel Fox, a founder of the National Organization for Women, called Ms. Tobias “a leading thinker in our movement.”“She was always looking for new ways to think,” Ms. Fox said. “She was a rebel.”

Incensed when two other men won the Nobel Prize in Medicine, he took out a newspaper ad that called his exclusion a “shameful wrong that must be righted.”Dr. Raymond Damadian, who built the first magnetic resonance imaging scanner, which revolutionized doctors’ ability to diagnose cancer and other illnesses — but who, to his dismay, saw the Nobel Prize for the science behind it go to two others — died on Aug. 3 at his home in Woodbury, N.Y. He was 86.The cause was cardiac arrest, said Daniel Culver, a spokesman for the Fonar Corporation, which Dr. Damadian founded in 1978.Since Dr. Damadian and his research assistants finished building the first M.R.I. scanner more than 40 years ago, it has become an essential piece of medical equipment, allowing doctors to peer inside the human body with more detail and greater resolution than X-rays and CT scans provide, without exposing patients to damaging radiation as many other technologies do.“We take it for granted now, but M.R.I. is absolutely spectacular,” Dr. Burton P. Drayer, the chairman of the radiology department at the Mount Sinai Health System in Manhattan, said in a phone interview. “M.R.I. is better at detecting cancers, particularly in the brain and spine.”But the question of who owned the idea, and the device, was a contentious one from the start.Two scientists whose research contributed to M.R.I. technology were later awarded a Nobel Prize, an honor that Dr. Damadian felt should have also gone to him. And no sooner had his machine come on the market than a handful of major corporations started producing their own versions, leading to years of court battles over patent rights.The vision of scanning the human body without radiation came to Dr. Damadian in the late 1960s, he said, when he was working on nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy — which, until then, had been used to identify the chemical makeup of the contents of a test tube — at Downstate Medical Center (now SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University) in Brooklyn.Working with rats, he discovered that when tissues were placed in a magnetic field and hit with a pulse of radio waves, cancerous ones emitted distinctly different radio signals than healthy ones.He published his findings in 1971 in the journal Science and was granted a patent three years later for an “apparatus and method for detecting cancer in tissue.” It took 18 months to build the first M.R.I., originally known as a nuclear magnetic resonance scanner, or N.M.R. Its first scan, on July 3, 1977, was of Lawrence Minkoff, one of Dr. Damadian’s assistants — a vivid and colorful image of his heart, lungs, aorta, cardiac chamber and chest wall.Dr. Damadian in his Brooklyn laboratory in 1977, the year his M.R.I. machine made the first human scan.via Fonar Corporation“Having birthed the original idea of the N.M.R. body scanner, we were intent on being the first to accomplish it,” Dr. Damadian said in the book “Gifted Mind: The Dr. Raymond Damadian Story, Inventor of the M.R.I.,” published in 2015, which he wrote with Jeff Kinley. “Failing to do so meant we might be denied the recognition for the original idea.”But the technology behind the M.R.I. had several fathers.Acknowledging that he was inspired by Dr. Damadian’s work, Paul C. Lauterbur of the State University of New York at Stony Brook had figured out how to translate the radio signals bounced off tissue into images. And Peter Mansfield of the University of Nottingham in England had developed mathematical techniques for analyzing the data, making the process more practical.Incorporating those advances, Dr. Damadian’s company, Fonar, based in Melville, N.Y., produced the first commercial scanner in 1980.But Fonar was soon confronted with competition from major corporations like General Electric, Johnson & Johnson, Siemens, Hitachi and Philips.Dr. Damadian sued them all for patent infringement. He lost his case against Johnson & Johnson when a federal judge in 1986 set aside a jury verdict in favor of Fonar,The judge, Dr. Damadian said, “did everything he could to sandbag us in court.”He won his biggest legal victory in 1997, when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit affirmed a lower court’s award of nearly $129 million in damages and interest from G.E. He also won smaller settlements from other manufacturers.“The court verdict gives us official recognition for origination,” Dr. Damadian told The New York Times after the G.E. decision.His pioneering work was also recognized when he received the National Medal of Technology from President Ronald Reagan in 1988 and was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1989. That same year he donated his first scanner, which he called Indomitable, to the Smithsonian Institution.But the recognition that he craved most — a Nobel Prize — eluded him.Dr. Damadian, left, with his 1977-model scanner and his colleagues Lawrence Minkoff, center, the subject of its first scan, and Michael Goldsmith.Raymond Vahan Damadian was born on March 16, 1936, in Manhattan, and grew up in Forest Hills, Queens. His father, Vahan, an immigrant from Turkey, was a newspaper photoengraver; his mother, Odette (Yazedjian) Damadian, was an accountant.Raymond studied violin for several years at Juilliard but diverted to science when he received a Ford Foundation scholarship to attend the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He majored in mathematics there and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1956. He received his medical degree four years later from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx and then became a fellow in biophysics at Harvard, where he became familiar with nuclear magnetic resonance technology.While working at Downstate and later at Fonar, Dr. Damadian was aware of Dr. Lauterbur, a chemist who was also working on M.R.I. imaging and with whom he shared the National Medal of Technology.In “Gifted Mind,” Dr. Damadian acknowledged that Dr. Lauterbur “realized that the N.M.R. signal differences in diseased and normal tissues I discovered could be used to construct a picture (image).”But in 2003, when Dr. Lauterbur and Dr. Mansfield won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for their contributions to the science of magnetic resonance imaging, Dr. Damadian was enraged.He wrote a letter to the American Medical Association, proclaiming that “some unconscionable scientific pilferer is trying to steal my entire life.”He then spent several hundred thousand dollars on an advertisement that ran in six major international newspapers. Headlined “The Shameful Wrong That Must Be Righted,” the ad claimed that the Nobel Prize committee had unfairly denied him the prize.At the bottom of the ad he provided a coupon, addressed to the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine, to let readers tell the committee that “the TRUTH must have a place,” and that it should add him as the third recipient of the award.Dr. Hans Ringertz, chairman that year of the Swedish committee that awards the prize, had no comment on Dr. Damadian’s claims but told The Times that there was nothing to prevent Dr. Damadian from being nominated in the future.A year later, Dr. Damadian received one of the two annual Bower Awards given by the Franklin Institute, a science museum in Philadelphia. He was cited for his business leadership.“There is no controversy in this,” said Dr. Bradford A. Jameson, a professor of biochemistry at Drexel University who was the chairman of the committee that chose the winners. “If you look at the patents in this field, they’re his.”Dr. Damadian said then that he was no longer concerned with the Nobel dispute. But he told The Times, “If people want to reconsider history apart from the facts, there’s not much that I can do about that.”Dr. Damadian continued to innovate. He created open M.R.I. machines, which alleviate the claustrophobia patients can experience during scans when they are moved slowly through a tight tunnel, as well as mobile and stand-up scanners.In recent years, he was focused on research that included imaging cerebral spinal fluid as it flowed to the brain.Fonar made and installed about 500 M.R.I. scanners, but today it is focused on managing imaging centers in the United States and servicing existing scanners.Dr. Damadian is survived by his daughter, Keira Reinmund; his sons, Timothy, Fonar’s president and chief executive since 2016, and Jevan; nine grandchildren; three great-grandchildren; and a sister, Claudette Chan. His wife, Donna (Terry) Damadian, died in 2020.In 1982, as the industry he helped create was in its infancy, Dr. Damadian told Newsday that he had not lost his inventor’s zeal for what lay ahead.“In 1977, I knew my machine could be a reality,” he said. “But until then, it was like building a model airplane. Now I know it’s for real.”Kenneth Chang

With a colleague, he created a miniaturized defibrillator that could be implanted inside patients suffering from potentially fatal arrhythmia.Morton Mower, an entrepreneurial cardiologist who helped invent an implantable defibrillator that has saved many lives by returning potentially fatal irregular heart rhythms to normal with an electrical jolt, died on April 25 in Denver. He was 89.His son, Mark, said the cause was cancer.Dr. Mower and Dr. Michel Mirowski, a colleague at Sinai Hospital in Baltimore, began work in 1969 on a device that would be small enough that it could be implanted under the skin of the abdomen and quickly correct a heart’s rhythms when they go dangerously awry.Dr. Mirowski had the idea to miniaturize a defibrillator; Dr. Mower, who had taught himself electrical engineering in his basement workshop, believed it could be done.“We were the crazy guys who wanted to put a time bomb in people’s chests,” Dr. Mower said in 2015 in an interview with the medical journal The Lancet, which noted at the time that two million people around the world had received the implantable device.The doctors quickly developed a prototype and formed a partnership in 1972 with Medrad, a medical equipment maker. But the development of an implantable defibrillator had its critics.Writing in Circulation, an American Heart Association journal, Dr. Bernard Lown, who invented the first effective external defibrillator, and Dr. Paul Axelrod said that patients with ventricular fibrillation were better served by surgery or an anti-arrhythmia program.“In fact,” they said, “the implanted defibrillator system represents an imperfect solution in search of a plausible and practical application.”The work continued. After being tested on animals, the battery-operated device, approximately the size of a deck of cards, was first implanted in humans at Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1980. Five years later, it was approved by the Food and Drug Administration.At the time, the F.D.A. said the implantable defibrillator could save 10,000 to 20,000 lives a year by letting people have their arrhythmia corrected quickly rather than waiting to reach hospital emergency rooms, where external defibrillators, with their paddles, are used.Dr. Donald M. Lloyd-Jones, president of the American Heart Association, said in a phone interview that 300,000 devices, now as small as a silver dollar, are implanted annually.“Letting people walk around with a defibrillator, rather than being in a hospital under constant care, was really revolutionary in saving the lives of people at risk of fatal heart attacks,” Dr. Lloyd-Jones said.He added that another advantage of the device — formally known as the automatic implantable cardioverter defibrillator — was that its electric shock is delivered directly to the heart. The external defibrillator’s jolt must travel from its paddles through skin and tissue before reaching the heart.Dr. Mower and Dr. Mirowski were inducted into the Inventors Hall of Fame in 2002, along with Alois Langer, a project engineer at Medrad, and M. Stephen Heilman, the company’s founder.Dr. Mower with his wife, Toby, a registered nurse.Jewish National Fund-USA, via Associated PressMorton Maimon Mower was born on Jan. 31, 1933, in Baltimore and grew up in Frederick, about 50 miles west. His father, Robert, was a cobbler, and his mother, Pauline (Maimon) Mower, was a homemaker.As a youngster, Morton worked during the summers for his Uncle Sam, who owned bathhouses and a toy store in Atlantic City. When his uncle got sick, Morton was impressed by how the family treated the doctor during his house calls.“They made him sit down; they made him have a cup of tea,” Dr. Mower told the alumni magazine of the University of Maryland School of Medicine, from which he graduated in 1959, in an interview. “I thought, Gee, that’s not bad. That’s what I would like to do.”After earning a bachelor’s degree from Johns Hopkins University in 1955, where he was in the pre-med program, and graduating from medical school, Dr. Mower completed an internship at the University of Maryland Medical Center.He became chief resident at Sinai Hospital in 1962 and then served from 1963 to 1965 in the Army Medical Corps in Bremerhaven, Germany, where he was chief of medicine.In 1966, he started a six-year stint as an investigator in Sinai’s coronary drug project. He eventually became an attending physician and chief of cardiology at the hospital. A building was named for him on its campus in 2005.Dr. Mower became wealthy from licensing the defibrillator technology and used his money to build a large art collection that included works by Rembrandt, Picasso and Impressionist masters.After leaving Sinai in 1989, he worked for two defibrillator makers: Cardiac Pacemakers, a subsidiary of Eli Lilly, as a vice president, and Guidant, as a consultant. He later taught medicine at Johns Hopkins and most recently, the University of Colorado school of medicine in Aurora.Dr. Mower recently created a company, Rocky Mountain Biphasic, to find commercial uses for his many patents in areas including cardiology, wound healing, diabetes and Covid-19.In addition to his son, he is survived by his wife, Toby (Kurland) Mower, a registered nurse; a daughter, Robin Mower; three grandsons; a brother, Bernard; and a sister, Susan Burke. He lived in Denver.Dr. Mower’s work in resetting the heart’s rhythms didn’t end with the implantable defibrillator.“I realized this was an incomplete therapy,” he told The Lancet, referring to the defibrillator. “It prevented right ventricular afibrillation, but it did nothing to support left ventricular function. People were stull dying of congestive heart failure.”He and Dr. Mirowski went on to invent cardiac resynchronization therapy, or C.R.T., which uses an implantable device much like a pacemaker to send electrical impulses to the right and left ventricles of the heart in order to force them to contract in a more efficient, organized pattern.“C.R.T. was every bit as big an advance as implantable defibrillators,” Dr. Mower said, adding that when he started testing the treatment on patients in the Netherlands, “It was almost unbelievable how the patients would come out of heart failure.”

Partly paralyzed as a college football player, he had a role in the inception of the Americans With Disability Act and raised money for spinal cord research.Kent Waldrep, a former college running back whose paralyzing injury in a 1974 game led to a life of activism in which he served with a federal agency that recommended enactment of the Americans for Disabilities Act and raised millions of dollars for spinal cord research, died on Feb. 27 in Natchitoches, La. He was 67.His mother, Denise Waldrep, said the cause was pneumonia. He was in hospice care in a hospital at his death.Mr. Waldrep was carrying the ball for Texas Christian University on a sweep play around the right end in a game against the University of Alabama in Birmingham on Oct. 26, 1974, when three defenders hit him high but could not bring him down. A fourth defender then threw a roll block into the back of his legs, causing him to flip over and land on his head. His fifth cervical vertebra was crushed and his spinal cord injured, leaving him paralyzed from the neck down.“I’ll always remember seeing the ground coming up, and I guess my head got pushed underneath me,” he told The Atlanta Constitution in 1984. “The other guys were on top of me and when I hit, it just snapped my neck.”Bear Bryant, though he was the rival team’s coach, was a regular visitor during Mr. Waldrep’s hospitalization and encouraged him in his rehabilitation. And at the next year’s T.C.U.-Alabama game, Mr. Waldrep, attending it in a wheelchair, was made an honorary Alabama letterman and given the game ball in Alabama’s 45-0 win.“Coach Bryant was a dear man who really took Kent’s injury badly,” Denise Waldrep said in an interview.Mr. Bryant was so dismayed that he saw to it that if Mr. Waldrep ever had children, they’d be allowed to attend Alabama if they chose. Mr. Waldrep’s sons, Trey and Charley, both went to Alabama under Bryant Scholarships.Although physical therapy helped him regain some use of his arms, but no individual finger movement, Mr. Waldrep sought further help in 1978 at the Polenov Neurosurgical Institute in what is now St. Petersburg, Russia. After six weeks of physiotherapy, sessions in a hyperbaric chamber and enzyme injections, he left with better use of his arms and hands. He credited the Soviet doctors and therapists with greater compassion than their American counterparts.“You couldn’t get a tear out of a doctor here even if you stuck an onion in his face,” he told Time magazine in 1978.In 1982, with his renown growing in disability circles for having traveled to the Soviet Union and returning home to Texas to start the short-lived International Spinal Cord Research Foundation, he was appointed to the National Council on the Handicapped by President Ronald Reagan. Mr. Waldrep eventually became vice chairman of the council, a federal agency that assesses laws and programs affecting the disabled. (It was renamed the National Council on Disability in 1988.)Robert L. Burgdorf Jr., a disability rights scholar who was the council’s lawyer, recalled Mr. Waldrep’s help in reviewing and suggesting changes in the draft of what became the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990. He said in an email that it was Mr. Waldrep who named the legislation in a 1985 memo in which he suggested that “all new legislation be packaged under one title such as ‘The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1986.’”“In this way,” Mr. Waldrep wrote, “I feel that the recommended legislative changes can be marketed much more effectively.”Alvis Kent Waldrep Jr. was born on March 2, 1954, in Austin, Texas. His father was a banker. His mother was a homemaker who later worked at an airplane repair station owned by her husband.Kent was an all-district and all-county running back in high school in Alvin, Texas, and received a scholarship from T.C.U. He was a reserve in 1973, and while he had started the first game of the 1974 season, he had just recovered from a bruised sternum before the Horned Frogs traveled to Birmingham to play Alabama.For years after the game, he thought of what he might have done to avoid being injured.“I used to think, Why didn’t I cut inside sooner?” he told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in 1989. “Why didn’t I reverse field?” He added, “There’s no way you can rationalize it. You can drive yourself completely nuts if you dwell on it.”He started the Kent Waldrep National Paralysis Foundation in 1985, and in 1994, he and the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas created the Kent Waldrep Foundation Center for Basic Research on Nerve Growth and Regeneration. It was endowed with more than $10 million raised by Mr. Waldrep’s foundation, mainly from an annual black tie dinner.“We used his funding to seed a tremendous amount of research,” Dr. Luis Parada, a developmental biologist and neuroscientist who directed the center for 21 years, said in a phone interview. “What I admired in addition to Kent’s large personality and motivation was that he understood that I was going to ask fundamental questions of neuroscience that were essential to understand and tackle the problem, like how nerve cells die and how do we keep them alive. He wasn’t seeking claims that we would solve the problem in the short term.”Mr. Waldrep’s health started to falter around 2005, and in 2012 he had a stroke that left him unable to work.In addition to his mother, he is survived by his sons; his wife, Lynn (Burgland) Waldrep; his sisters, Carole Stanley and Terry Keller; and two grandsons. He lived in Natchitoches.During the 1990s, Mr. Waldrep fought to be regarded as an employee of T.C.U. at the time of his catastrophic injury, which would have qualified him for workers’ compensation payments. In 1993, the Texas Workers’ Compensation Commission agreed with him, that as a scholarship athlete he had been an employee of the university and awarded him $70 a week for life and tens of thousands of dollars to cover his medical costs. (In 1998, the N.C.A.A. initiated a catastrophic injury insurance program for athletes disabled in a covered sports activity.)But the university’s insurance carrier appealed, and a jury in Texas District Court returned a 10-2 verdict against Mr. Waldrep in 1997, saying that he had not been an employee of T.C.U. A state appeals court upheld the verdict in 2000.The court wrote that it based its decision on conditions in college football at the time of Mr. Waldrep’s injury, not as they had changed in the quarter-century since.“We express no opinion as to whether our decision would be the same in an analogous situation arising today,” the court said.Last year, Mr. Waldrep’s belief that college players like himself were de facto university employees found some agreement when the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the N.C.A.A. could not prevent relatively modest payments to student-athletes. They can now cash in on their names, images and likenesses in corporate deals.

He was at the forefront of studies that found links between salt, diet and other risk factors and cardiovascular ailments.Jeremiah Stamler, an indefatigable cardiovascular researcher who was at the forefront of studies that identified risk factors for heart disease and ways to prevent it, died on Wednesday at his home in Sag Harbor, N.Y., on Long Island. He was 102.His stepson Michael Beckerman confirmed the death.Dr. Stamler’s long career also had a distinction unrelated to medicine: He faced down the notorious House Committee on Un-American Activities by refusing to testify when he was subpoenaed, and he sued the committee for having no legislative purpose.In his studies, Dr. Stamler demonstrated that eating a healthier diet, exercising, not smoking and reducing salt intake would reduce the likelihood of heart disease and strokes — advice that is commonplace now but was not widely accepted decades ago.“I was always interested in the heart artery problem,” he said in an interview with The Chicago Tribune in 2019. “Why did human beings with diabetes get more heart artery disease? What’s the relation of habitual lifestyle, fat intake, saturated fat intake, cholesterol intake, salt intake with cardiovascular disease?”Dr. Stamler undertook his research in a hospital laboratory in Chicago after World War II, where he fed chickens feed heavy in cholesterol to learn what happened to their arteries; at the Chicago Board of Health, where he started a program to prevent rheumatic fever; and at the Northwestern University School of Medicine, where he founded the department of preventive medicine in 1972 and was its chairman for many years.“Many, including myself, believe that he is largely responsible for the remarkable decline in coronary heart disease and stroke that occurred in the U.S. over the past few decades,” Dr. Lawrence Appel, a professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins University, wrote in an email. “Cardiovascular disease remains a major cause of disease and death, but it was far worse.”Dr. Donald Lloyd-Jones, chairman of Northwestern’s department of preventive medicine and president of the American Heart Association, added: “He was part of a generation of scientists who put the traditional risk factors for heart disease on the map. He did the studies to show that smoking, diabetes, obesity and cholesterol drive most heart attacks.”One of Dr. Stamler’s studies, involving more than 300,000 people, looked at the ideal levels for weight, cholesterol and physical activity to achieve cardiovascular health — a set of standards the American Heart Association adopted.Another study, of about 10,000 people worldwide, showed that high salt intake was “one of the quantitatively important, preventable mass exposures causing the unfavorable population-wide blood pressure pattern that is a major risk factor for epidemic cardiovascular disease,” he wrote in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition in 1997.A study of dietary factors that contribute to high blood pressure, which Dr. Stamler began about 30 years ago, is continuing. He last applied for a grant renewal when he was 95.Gordon M. Grant for The New York TimesA third study, begun about 30 years ago and still ongoing, looks at dietary factors besides salt, like animal protein, that contribute to high blood pressure.“I remember there being criticism that he was an older man in his 70s, and could he complete the five years of the project,” Dr. Philip Greenland, a professor in Northwestern’s department of preventive medicine, said in an interview. “Then he had multiple renewals of the grant application, and at the last renewal he was 95 years old.”Jeremiah Stamler was born on Oct. 27, 1919, in Brooklyn and grew up in West Orange, N.J. His parents — George Stamler, a dentist, and Rose (Baras) Stamler, a teacher — had immigrated from Russia.After receiving a bachelor’s degree from Columbia University, he earned his medical degree from Long Island College of Medicine (now SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University) in Brooklyn in 1943 and was an intern at Kings County Hospital Center, also in Brooklyn. He served in the Army in Bermuda as a radiologist before beginning his career at Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago, where he worked with Dr. Louis Katz, a top cardiology researcher.“Dr. Katz told me, ‘Why the hell do you want to go into research?’” Dr. Stamler told The Tribune. “‘You never win. When you first discover something, people will say, “I don’t believe it.” Then you do more research and verify it and they’ll say, “Yes, but. …” Then you do more research, verify it further, and they’ll say, “I knew it all the time.”’ And he was right.”In the late 1950s, Dr. Stamler joined both the Chicago Board of Health and Northwestern, as a part-time assistant professor of medicine. In 1965, when he was director of the board’s heart disease control program, he was subpoenaed to testify by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Accused of having been part of a Communist Party underground in the 1950s, he refused to testify or to take the Fifth Amendment, as many other witnesses did. Instead he gave a statement saying he was a loyal American.He and two others — one of whom was Yolanda Hall, a nutritionist who collaborated with Dr. Stamler at the Board of Health — filed a lawsuit on the grounds that the committee was unconstitutional and had no legislative function.“Its function was to embarrass people, to make them take the Fifth Amendment, lose their jobs and ruin their lives,” Thomas Sullivan, one of his lawyers, said in a video on the website of his firm, Jenner & Block. “They didn’t care what the answers were.”Dr. Stamler was indicted on a charge of contempt of Congress for refusing to answer questions from the committee and walking out of the hearing. He was suspended by the Board of Health. He watched his legal case climb the federal court system, up to the United States Supreme Court.Finally, in 1973, the committee — by then called the House Internal Security Committee — dropped the charges against him, and he dropped his lawsuit.Although the committee’s constitutionality did not go to trial, Dr. Stamler told The Chicago Tribune in 1973 that the dismissal of his suit set a legal precedent “that can be relied on by any citizen whose civil liberties are threatened as ours were.”In early 1975, the House disbanded the committee, an action that Mr. Sullivan believed was caused largely by Dr. Stamler’s case.Dr. Stamler published nearly 700 peer-reviewed papers and wrote 22 books and monographs, including “Your Heart Has Nine Lives” (with Alton Blakeslee, 1963), and “The Hypertension Handbook” (1974).In addition to his stepson Michael, he is survived by his son, Paul; another stepson, Jonathan Beckerman; five step-grandchildren; and two step-great-grandchildren. His first wife, Rose (Steinberg) Stamler, who was also his research partner and an associate professor of preventive medicine at Northwestern, died in 1998; his second wife, Gloria (Beckerman) Stamler, died last year.Dr. Greenland, who succeeded Dr. Stamler as chairman of Northwestern’s department of preventive medicine, said that when Dr. Stamler was 85, “we had a big party for him because we thought ‘How much longer can this go on?’ and we should take advantage of him being cognitively intact and physically well. Colleagues from around the world came.“And when he turned 90,” he added, “we had another party, and at 95 it was time for another party, and then another one when he turned 100.”Asked in 2005 about his longevity, Dr. Stamler told The New York Times: “My father died at 84, my mother at 90. When I was a kid, a doctor convinced my father to change his diet — he was a meat and potatoes man — to lots of fruits and vegetables. I started smoking in college and quit in medical school when I became short of breath walking up two flights of stairs.”Dr. Stamler, a follower of the Mediterranean diet, added: “I always exercised and I still do, a minimum of an hour every day. I love to eat and I believe in the pleasure of eating.”

Using the Human Genome Project as her guide, she helped find genes responsible for cardiovascular disease, autism and a rare disorder called Miller syndrome.Deborah Nickerson, a human genomics researcher who helped discover genes responsible for cardiovascular disease, autism and Miller syndrome, a rare condition that causes malformations of the face and limbs, died on Dec. 24 at her home in Seattle. She was 67.Her brother, William Nickerson, who is her only immediate survivor, said the cause was abdominal cancer, which had been diagnosed less than a week earlier.In her research, Dr. Nickerson employed the findings of the Human Genome Project, which completed its historic genetic sequencing of every human gene in 2003, and made them medically useful. By sequencing the genes of thousands of healthy people, she revealed how genetic variation could be used to target specific genes that cause inherited disorders.“Her imprint on genomic medicine is profound,” said Dr. Gail Jarvik, a professor of medicine and genome science at the University of Washington School of Medicine. “Her role was in really helping us understand what changes in DNA among people meant, and in identifying what gene was changed in rare diseases.”Dr. Nickerson was also a professor of genome sciences at the University of Washington and was a founder and director of one of the five clinical sites that comprise the Gregor Consortium, the successor to the Centers for Mendelian Genomics, named after Gregor Mendel, a 19th-century Austrian monk known as the father of genetics.Funded by the National Institutes of Health, the consortium seeks to identify gene mutations responsible for what are known as Mendelian disorders, in which patients have a mutation in one gene, like that for cystic fibrosis or sickle cell anemia.Working with Drs. Michael Bamshad and Jay Shendure, Dr. Nickerson found the gene for Miller syndrome, one of about 7,000 Mendelian disorders, in 2009. Dr. Francis Collins, the former director of the N.I.H. who is now a senior investigator at the National Human Genome Research Institute, a part of the N.I.H., called the discovery of the Miller syndrome gene “an explosive moment” and a “jaw-dropping” example of genome sequencing, the technique used to read all or part of a person’s genome, an organism’s complete set of DNA.“I never envisioned that we’d be able to do that in my career or lifetime,” he said in a phone interview, referring to the ability to determine a person’s illness by reading his genome.Dr. Bamshad, also by phone, said: “Debbie was instrumental in developing the technology so that we could prove it could be done on other conditions. She was a great, hard-nosed scientist passionate about the role of trainees and women in science.”The technology that Dr. Miller and her colleagues used led a year later to the discovery of genetic alterations that are responsible for Kabuki syndrome, a rare congenital disorder that causes children to be born with elongated eyes and arched eyebrows (The term derives from the appearance of actors using exaggerated makeup in Kabuki theater.)Deborah Ann Nickerson was born in Mineola, N.Y., on Long Island, and grew up in Jamaica, Queens, and West Islip, also on Long Island. Her parents, William and Josephine (Veccia) Nickerson, owned a garden center.She graduated from Adelphi University in 1974 with a bachelor’s degree in biology and received her Ph.D in immunology from the University of Tennessee. She was a postdoctoral scholar in the division of infectious diseases from 1978-79 at the University of Kentucky’s college of medicine.“I love science,” she said in a video on her university home page. “It was probably my hardest subject in school, and that’s why it drives me. You want to get better and understand more.”Starting in 1979, Dr. Nickerson spent nearly a decade teaching biology at the University of South Florida before joining the biology department at the California Institute of Technology, first as a visiting associate and then as a senior research scientist. There she worked under Dr. Leroy Hood, who led the team that invented the DNA sequencer, which made the Human Genome Project possible.She followed Dr. Hood to the University of Washington’s newly-created department of molecular biotechnology in 1992. After it merged with the university’s department of genetics in 2001, she stayed to form the department of genome sciences.Dr. Nickerson was an early adapter of technologies that made DNA sequencing less expensive; using them, she created a catalog of human genetic variation from a diverse population by sequencing the genes of more than 6,500 volunteers. She then made it available online to other researchers, who have advanced it further.She also led a group of researchers who in 2017 reported finding genetic variants among patients’ different responses to the blood thinner Warfarin, which had been a longstanding clinical problem.Dr. Nickerson’s creative, unfiltered, tenacious style served her well in advising women and underserved minorities in her field, having risen in what had been a male-dominated world; in fighting for what she wanted when applying for grants; and in dealing with the leadership of the N.I.H. and its National Human Genome Research Institute.“I was the N.H.G.R.I. director for less than an hour, and she was telling me how to do my job,” said Eric Green, who was appointed to that position in 2009. “The remarkable part is that she was almost always completely right.”Dr. Jarvik recalled how Dr. Nickerson would counsel her on seeking grant money, encouraging her to ask for more and to aim higher. “She had entrepreneurial instincts,” she said, “and she understood big opportunities.”She added, “I’m not a native risk-taker, and I’ve tried to ask myself, ‘What would Debbie do?’”

After one of his sons fell into a deep depression, he helped him recover. He later licensed an antidepressant that was a boon to his pharmaceutical company.Howard Solomon was building the pharmaceutical company Forest Laboratories, not by manufacturing drugs but by licensing them. In his search for deals in the United States and Europe, he learned about citalopram, a Danish antidepressant. He did not license it, though, believing the U.S. market was saturated with drugs to treat depression.Then, in 1994, a family crisis intervened: His older son, Andrew, a writer, had fallen into a deep depression. Mr. Solomon moved Andrew into his apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and took weeks off from work to take care of him; he even cut his food. He talked to experts about pharmaceuticals that might help Andrew. And he accompanied him on a tour to promote his novel, “A Stone Boat.”“My father was like a reef that took the violent waves of a frightening world and broke them down into gentle, manageable undulations before they reached the beach where I stood,” Andrew Solomon said in an email.After two types of antidepressants were unable to help Andrew, a third did. His experience persuaded his father to make the deal a few years later for citalopram, which, under the name Celexa, became a billion-dollar drug for Forest Labs in the class of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, along with Prozac, Zoloft and Paxil.Howard Solomon died on Jan. 8 at his home in Bedford Hills, N.Y. He was 94. Andrew Solomon confirmed the death.When Howard Solomon introduced Celexa to the Forest Labs sales force in 1998, he read from the manuscript of Andrew’s book “The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression.”“I will be on medication for a long time,” he read aloud. “Every morning and every night, I look at the pills in my hand, and sometimes they seem like writing in my hand, hieroglyphics saying that the future may be all right and that I owe it to myself to live on and see.”“The Noonday Demon” was published in 2001. In its dedication, Andrew Solomon wrote, “For my father, who gave me life not once, but twice.” It went on to win the National Book Award for nonfiction.When Howard Solomon introduced Celexa to the Forest Laboratories sales force, he read from the manuscript of his son’s book “The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression.”via Andrew SolomonHoward Solomon was born on Aug. 12, 1927, in the Bronx. His father, David, a Romanian immigrant, made neckties out of dress remnants. His mother, Faye (Gussow) Solomon, worked with her husband.After serving in the Army in Hawaii, Howard majored in history at the City College of New York and received a bachelor’s degree in 1949. He graduated from Yale Law School three years later and worked for various law firms before starting his own in the early 1960s, specializing in corporate law; along the way, he joined the Forest Labs board and became the company’s outside counsel.He was appointed president and chief executive in 1977 after the company’s chairman, Hans Lowey, and three other executives were accused of inflating profits. He divested the company of divisions that made candy and vitamins and adopted a strategy of licensing pharmaceuticals and marketing them aggressively.Forest Labs was transformed by licensing Celexa from H. Lundbeck, the Danish company that developed it. But Lundbeck’s chief executive, Erik Sprunk-Jansen, was initially reluctant to speak to Mr. Solomon because licensing deals with some other U.S. companies had unraveled.“Howard flew to Denmark to meet with him,” Phil Satow, a former executive vice president of Forest Labs, said in a phone interview. “Both were lovers of ballet, which became the common chord between them, and they developed a strong relationship.”Celexa’s sales grew quickly, peaking at nearly $1.5 billion in 2003. Forest Labs then licensed Lexapro, an upgraded version of Celexa, which first reached $2 billion in sales in 2007.But the success of Celexa had a downside. In 2010, Forest Labs paid $313 million to settle criminal and civil complaints that a subsidiary, Forest Pharmaceuticals, had illegally promoted the drug to children and adolescents (it had been approved only for adult depression) and had paid doctors to induce them to prescribe Celexa and Lexapro.“Forest Pharmaceuticals deliberately chose to pursue corporate profits over its obligations to the F.D.A. and the American public,” Carmen Ortiz, the U.S. attorney for Massachusetts, said when the settlement was announced.The company denied the allegations. In a statement at the time, Mr. Solomon said, “We remain dedicated to ensuring that we operate in full compliance with all laws and regulations.”In 2011, Forest Labs won a proxy fight against the shareholder activist Carl C. Icahn, who had argued that the company had, among other things, lost billions of dollars of shareholder value over the previous decade. Mr. Icahn continued to pursue Forest Labs with a second proxy fight in 2012, which ended with one of his nominees elected to the company’s board.In a letter to Mr. Icahn during that fight, Mr. Solomon wrote: “Your discourse thus far has shown a striking lack of strategic ideas. Instead, it has been replete with wild and baseless accusations, innuendo and distortion of facts.”Still, at some point, Mr. Solomon reached out to Mr. Icahn, and they had a series of dinners.“We got friendly,” Mr. Icahn said in a phone interview. “I thought he was a nice gentleman, a courtly guy.” He added: “I didn’t agree with the way he ran the business necessarily, but he was a nice guy who was thrilled with the outcome. He made a lot of money.”In 2013, Mr. Solomon announced his retirement as chief executive and was replaced by Brent Saunders, an executive friendly with Mr. Icahn. Then, in early 2014, Actavis (now Allergan) paid $25 billion to acquire Forest Labs. Mr. Solomon, still the chairman, left after the acquisition and formed a family investment firm with his younger son, David, who had been a Forest Labs executive.In addition to his sons, Mr. Solomon is survived by his wife, Sarah Billinghurst Solomon, a former assistant general manager of artistic affairs at the Metropolitan Opera, and five grandchildren. His first wife, Carolyn (Bower) Solomon, died in 1991.Mr. Solomon had extensive philanthropic interests, especially opera. As a teenager he paid for piano lessons at the Manhattan School of Music by selling librettos to patrons of the old Metropolitan Opera on 39th Street and Broadway. He later became chairman of the Met’s finance committee, chairman of New York City Ballet and a board member of Lincoln Center.His desire to work into his 80s was, he said, inspired by the example of Giuseppe Verdi.“Growing up, he’d talk about Verdi writing ‘Falstaff’ in his 80s,” Andrew Solomon said. “‘Imagine that,’ he’d say, ‘in his 80s, he wrote some of the greatest music ever written.’ That was the path he hoped to follow.”

His wide-ranging research helped transform his field, a colleague said, by “insisting on using data to drive thinking about diagnosis and treatment.”Dr. Michael Rutter, a British child psychiatrist whose many transformative studies included one that demonstrated the genetics of autism and another that assessed how poor treatment suffered by Romanian children in orphanages affected them after they were adopted by English families, died on Oct. 23 at his home in Dulwich, a suburb of London. He was 88.The cause was cancer, said Sandra Woodhouse, his personal assistant at King’s College London.In more than a half-century at what is now the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King’s College, Dr. Rutter was known for his clinical expertise in treating children with mental health problems, and for his ambitious research. In 1973, he was awarded Britain’s first professorship in child psychiatry.“He really created modern child psychiatry by insisting on using data to drive thinking about diagnosis and treatment,” Bennett Leventhal, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, said in a phone interview. “If you go back to the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, the focus of psychiatry came out of psychoanalysis, which was built largely on case vignettes. That’s not bad — it’s what we had — but Rutter said we can do better.”In the 1960s and ’70s, Dr. Rutter and his research team conducted what Dr. Leventhal said were the first epidemiological studies in child and adolescent psychiatry. They established that psychiatric problems were fairly common among children on the rural Isle of Wight and an inner borough of London, and that the children’s feelings of misery and depression affected, among other things, how well or poorly they did in school.Dr. Rutter also discovered that emotional, behavioral and reading problems were twice as common among the children in London as they were on the Isle of Wight, but that children in both areas were affected by family discord, their parents’ psychiatric problems and criminality, and overcrowding in their homes.The studies “played a major role in understanding how biological brain pathology influenced development,” Dr. Rutter told The Annual Review of Developmental Psychology this year. “It’s not that it had not been thought of before, but it was the first time it had been systematically studied.”Dr. Rutter challenged the idea that autism was caused by the impact of distant parents — more specifically, so-called refrigerator mothers — and the idea that it was a form of schizophrenia.In a 1977 study, Dr. Rutter and Susan Folstein examined why there was a higher incidence of autism between identical twins, who share the same set of genes, than between fraternal twins, who share half of their genes. They concluded that autism was largely genetic. It was a stunning finding at the time, but it has since been validated in molecular studies.“Before Rutter, the heritability of autism was doubted,” Manuel Casanova, a professor of biomedical sciences at the University of South Carolina, said in an email. “Rutter brought it to the forefront and implied that it was larger than previously suspected.”In 1998, when a paper in the medical journal The Lancet suggested a link between autism and the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine, Dr. Rutter set out to disprove its finding. He looked at the incidence of autism in countries that had stopped using the vaccine, particularly Japan.“And what our findings showed is that the rate continued going on up — that the withdrawal of a supposed risk factor had not made a difference, and if anything it had got worse, not better,” he said in 2008 in an interview for a video project called “Today’s Neuroscience, Tomorrow’s History.” (The Lancet retracted the paper in 2010.)Dr. Rutter in an undated photo. Studies he conducted, he said, “played a major role in understanding how biological brain pathology influenced development.” via Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience, King’s College LondonMichael Llewellyn Rutter was born on Aug. 15, 1933, in Broumana, Lebanon, near Beirut, where his father, Dr. Llewellyn Rutter, worked at a hospital. His mother, Winifred (Barber) Rutter, was a homemaker.A few years later, Michael and his family moved to Wolverhampton, in the West Midlands, England, where his father worked as a general practitioner.But in 1940, his parents, fearful that Germany might invade England, sent Michael and his sister, Priscilla, to the United States, where they lived with separate foster families in the same small town.“My new foster parents were punctilious in not taking over from my parents,” he told The Journal of the Canadian Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry in 2010. After four enjoyable years — his sister, in contrast, had a difficult time, especially after being rejected by her first foster family — he returned, he said, “as an ebullient American teenager” whose grandmother asked his mother, “Do you think we’ve got the right ones back?”He entered the University of Birmingham Medical School in 1950, planing to be a general practitioner and join his father’s practice. But he became fascinated by neurology and neurosurgery and then by psychiatry, inspired by a professor, Wilhelm Mayer-Gross, a prominent psychiatrist who had fled Nazi Germany. Dr. Rutter worked at various British hospitals after graduating from medical school in 1955 and was a pediatrics fellow at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, in the Bronx, from 1961 to 1962. He joined the social psychiatry research unit at Maudsley Hospital in London in 1962, and the Institute of Psychiatry, also in London, in 1966. He was knighted in 1992.Dr. Rutter wrote or co-wrote more than 400 papers and 40 books, including “Fifteen Thousand Hours: Secondary Schools and Their Effects on Children” (1979), based on a study of the problems faced by London schoolchildren during 12 years of education.He also wrote “Maternal Deprivation Reassessed” (1972), which suggested that children can develop strong attachments not just to their mothers but also to other people, both inside and outside their families, who will affect heir mental health and development. It was a challenge to the work of John Bowlby, a British psychiatrist whose “attachment theory” argued that a mother’s love is absolutely critical to a child and that its deprivation can have dire results.Survivors include Dr. Rutter’s wife, Marjorie (Heys) Rutter, a nurse and the co-author with him of “Developing Minds: Challenge And Continuity Across The Lifespan” (1993); his daughters, Sheila and Christine; his son, Stephen; his sister, Priscilla, and seven grandchildren.As increasing numbers of Romanian orphans were adopted by families in Britain in the early 1990s, Dr. Rutter and several colleagues began a long-term study to determine how well the children recovered from the difficult conditions they had experienced in orphanages.Many of them, he found, adapted quickly to their new homes, but some who were adopted after they were six months old had higher rates of autism spectrum disorder, overactivity and poor personal engagement than a control group of children who had been adopted within Britain. By age 15, some of the Romanian children’s emotional, conduct, cognitive and social relationship problems could be traced to their early privations.“Mike interviewed the children himself,” Dr. Leventhal said. “He needed to hear their voices.”Edmund Sonuga-Barke, a professor of developmental psychology, psychiatry and neuroscience at King’s College who collaborated on the study, said it had been Dr. Rutter’s innovative idea to “stratify” the sample of Romanian children into how long each had been in an institution.“That’s really important if you’re going to go past a mere correlation to say, ‘Yeah, there might be a causal relationship here,’” he said in a video made by King’s College to celebrate Dr. Rutter’s retirement this year. “So you can show what they call in pharmacology the ‘dose effect.’ Is there an effect of the dose of deprivation on young people’s outcomes?”