A neuropsychologist, she wrote a textbook that became an essential guide to describing and evaluating brain damage and dysfunction.Muriel Lezak, a neuropsychologist who wrote a landmark textbook in the early days of her discipline that became an essential guide to the description and evaluation of brain injuries and disorders, died on Oct. 6 in a memory care facility in Portland, Ore. She was 94.Her death was confirmed by her nephew Stephen Lezak.Dr. Lezak began working as a clinical psychologist in the late 1940s. Two decades later, at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Portland, she brought her abiding curiosity about the connection between the brain and behavior to her treatment of soldiers who had suffered neurological damage in World War I, World War II and the Vietnam War.“I was the psychologist for neurology, neurosurgery and rehab,” she said in an oral history interview with Oregon Health & Science University in 2016. “It was like pig heaven, you know?”Dr. Lezak became keenly interested in patients with frontal lobe damage, which affects creativity, reasoning and the ability to relate to people and to plan and organize. As she dealt with interns and other medical personnel, she realized that there was no book in her evolving field that comprehensively reviewed the major disorders caused by brain dysfunction and injury, or the techniques, tests and procedures to evaluate patients.Her book “Neuropsychological Assessment,” published in 1976, filled that gap. It also added tests that she developed to evaluate brain dysfunction, like seeing how a patient drew a bicycle, that could provide insights into motor control and perception. She emphasized a flexible approach, adapting procedures to suit an individual patient’s problems, a departure from the standardized tests that were then common.“There had been nothing at the time that focused on the nuts and bolts of evaluation, and she did a really nice job of looking at the pattern of a broad range of assessments before making a conclusion about a diagnosis,” Kathleen Haaland, a neuropsychologist and professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine, said in a phone interview.Ida Sue Baron, a neuropsychologist and clinical professor emeritus of pediatrics at George Washington University School of Medicine in Washington, said in an email: “The publication of this book brought the field together coherently for the first time, by integrating the methods and the science for those of us who had no other references, and even for those not in our profession who wished to understand what neuropsychology was really all about.”Dr. Lezak was the sole author of two subsequent editions of the book and one of the writers of the fourth and fifth editions; a sixth edition, likely to be published in 2023, will be renamed “Lezak’s Neuropsychological Assessment.”At the V.A. hospital, where Dr. Lezak worked until 1985, she started a support group to help military wives cope with the altered behavior of their brain-injured husbands.“The people they were married to were no longer there; it was somebody else who was similar, looked pretty much the same, but was no longer the person they were able to love and interact with comfortably,” she said in the oral history.Muriel Elaine Deutsch was born on Aug. 26, 1927, in Chicago, where her father, Lester, was a furrier and her mother, Sylvia (Friedman) Deutsch, was a homemaker who helped with the fur business’s bookkeeping.Muriel’s fascination with medicine began when she wondered why her grandmother, who was in a wheelchair, couldn’t walk. But instead of going to a medical school — which she didn’t think would admit a woman with young children — she pursued psychology.She graduated from the University of Chicago with a bachelor’s degree in general studies in 1947 and a master’s in human development in 1949. That same year she married Sidney Lezak, a lawyer; they soon moved to Portland, where he would serve as the United States attorney in Oregon from 1961 to 1982.She received a doctorate in clinical psychology at the University of Portland in 1960. She later said that she could not have studied for that degree or worked simultaneously as a clinical psychologist without Mr. Lezak.“For me, he was ‘Sweetie,’” she said in an interview in 2016 with Dr. Haaland for the International Neuropsychological Society. “He was supportive from the get-go at a time when many husbands thought the little lady should be home baking cookies and going to the P.T.A. meetings and being nice.”She added, “As my career developed, it was fun; he wore me like a rose in his buttonhole.”Dr. Lezak worked at clinics and taught psychology at Portland State College (now University) and the University of Portland from 1949 until she began her 19-year tenure at the V.A. hospital in 1966. In 1985, she left to teach at the Oregon Health & Science University, where she was a professor of neurology, neurosurgery and psychiatry until 2005. She long had a private practice, and she continued to see patients until a few years ago.As early as 1982, Dr. Lezak sounded an alarm about the impact of head injuries incurred by athletes; in 1999 and 2001, she was an author and researcher of studies that found cognitive impairment in amateur and professional soccer players caused by repeatedly using their heads to hit the ball. She and Erik Matser, a co-author of both studies, warned of second-impact syndrome in which a seemingly harmless blow to the head can cause a serious injury.“I’d say that anybody under the age of 18 should not be heading,’‘ she told The New York Times in 2001. ‘’I think there’s some risks you just don’t take, because if you do have damage to the brain, there will be some residuals, and they won’t go away.”She was also an expert witness in various legal cases, including one in 2011 in which she concluded that Gary Haugen, a twice-convicted murderer who was sitting on death row in Oregon and wanted to be executed, had a “delusional disorder that makes him incompetent to be executed.” Mr. Haugen said he hadn’t given his permission to use the results of Dr. Lezak’s examination as part of his defense lawyers’ effort to block his execution.Dr. Lezak is survived by her daughters, Anne and Miriam Lezak, and nine grandchildren. Her son, David, died in 2014. Her husband died in 2006.In her interview with Dr. Haaland, Dr. Lezak recalled that before her textbook was published, patients with brain disorders and dysfunction were given a battery of standard tests by technicians, who gave the results to a psychologist.“God forbid the psychologist ever really saw the patient!” she said. “My book emphasized focusing on the patient and doing what was appropriate for the patient, not the test purveyor.”

After her son was found to be autistic, she started organizations to help children and adults. She also consulted on the making of the movie “Rain Man.”Ruth Sullivan, a public health nurse who became an influential advocate for autistic children and adults after one of her sons was diagnosed with the disorder in the early 1960s, died on Sept. 16 at a senior living center in Huntington, W.Va. She was 97.Her daughter Lydia Sullivan said the cause was atrial fibrillation, an abnormal heart rhythm.For more than 40 years, Dr. Sullivan was a tireless champion for educational and other opportunities for people on the autism spectrum. She was a founder of the Autism Society, a national grass-roots organization, and secured state funding to open the West Virginia Autism Training Center at Marshall University.She started and ran the Autism Services Center, which provides residential, therapeutic and community services, and for several years offered information and referrals by telephone from her home in Huntington, where she and her husband, William, raised seven children.“Our dinners were often interrupted by hysterical parents calling,” Lydia Sullivan said in a phone interview, “and my mother would spend the evenings talking to desperate parents from around the world.”Dr. Sullivan was once that parent desperate for information about autism. When her son Joseph received his diagnosis in 1963, at the age of 3, autism was a mysterious disorder that most pediatricians knew little about. She took Joseph to a doctor in Lake Charles, La., where the family was living at the time, and he quickly recognized that Joseph was autistic.“I said, ‘What is that?’” she recalled when she was interviewed on a podcast in 2016 by Marc Ellison, the executive director of the Autism Training Center and one of her protégés. “He said he will always be odd. But he couldn’t offer anything else.”Nearly as disturbing to Dr. Sullivan was a prevailing psychological theory that cold and distant parents — most notably what were referred to as “refrigerator mothers” — were responsible for causing their children’s autism.“I knew it wasn’t true,” she said on the podcast. “I didn’t love Joseph any less than the others. I treated him differently because he didn’t behave like the others.” She added: “I’m the oldest of seven. I have seven children. I was a nurse. I knew something about children.”Research led her to read the book “Infantile Autism: The Syndrome and Its Implications for a Neural Theory of Behavior” (1964), by Bernard Rimland, a psychologist with an autistic son. He rebutted the claim that neglectful parents caused autism in their children and argued that autism was a result of genetics and, possibly, environmental factors.Dr. Sullivan wrote to Dr. Rimland about starting a national network of parents that would receive the latest research about autism. In 1965, the two of them and a group of parents who had also written to Dr. Rimland met at a house in Teaneck, N.J., where they founded the National Society for Autistic Children (now the Autism Society), a support group that would eventually have numerous local chapters throughout the country. In 1969, she was elected its president.At about that time, Dr. Sullivan was also trying to overcome a local school board’s resistance to providing an education to autistic children like Joseph. She brought a prepared statement to a school board meeting, and local newspapers wrote about her campaign to educate Joseph.“For almost six weeks, I was on the phone every day trying to persuade them to set up a special class,” she told The Sunday Gazette-Mail of Charleston, W.Va., in 1972. “The next week,” Dr. Sullivan added, “there was a class for Joseph and 12 other children. With the help of some dedicated teachers, they’ve been attending school ever since.”She lobbied for the passage in 1975 of what came to be called the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act, which required public schools that received federal money to provide equal access to children with disabilities. She helped write the language to include autistic children when the law was amended 15 years later.She was a technical adviser to “Rain Man,” Barry Levinson’s 1988 film about an autistic man (Dustin Hoffman) and his brother (Tom Cruise). Mr. Hoffman studied two documentaries featuring Joseph to prepare for the role, including outtakes from “Portrait of an Autistic Young Man” (1986), which was shown on PBS stations.“That’s where I met Joe, in a sense,” Mr. Hoffman told The Associated Press in 1988 at a showing of “Rain Man” in Huntington that, at Dr. Sullivan’s request, was a fund-raiser for the Autism Services Center. “I buried myself there for the first two months.”Joseph’s favorite scene in the film was when Mr. Hoffman’s character, Raymond Babbit, quickly counted spilled toothpicks.Mr. Hoffman thanked Dr. Sullivan and Joseph when he accepted the Oscar for best actor. She believed that the film helped broaden the public’s understanding of autism.Dr. Sullivan in 2018. For more than 40 years, she fought for educational and other opportunities for people on the autism spectrum.Rick Lee/Huntington QuarterlyRuth Marie Christ was born on April 20, 1924, in Port Arthur, Texas, 90 miles east of Houston. Her father, Lawrence, worked in oil refineries, then turned to farming after he and his family moved to Mowata, La., when Ruth was very young. Her mother, Ada (Matt) Christ, worked in a department store.After graduating from the nursing program at Charity Hospital in New Orleans in 1943, Dr. Sullivan served in the Army Nurse Corps, treating soldiers during World War II at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio (now Joint Base San Antonio).After the war ended, she moved to Lake Charles for four years, then attended Teachers College at Columbia University on the G.I. Bill. After receiving bachelor’s and master’s degrees in public health, she worked as a nurse in Manhattan. She married William Sullivan, an English professor, in 1952 and accompanied him to teaching posts in Columbia, Mo., Lake Charles and Albany, working part time as a nurse until her fourth child was born in 1958.Joseph, her fifth child, was born in 1960. He started speaking early but began to withdraw at 18 months. By his second birthday, Dr. Sullivan wrote in her journal — which was quoted by The Gazette-Mail in 1972 — “he could say only eight words. He would indicate what he wanted by grunts, guiding our hands to what he wanted.”In 1984, at 60, she earned a Ph.D. in special education, speech pathology and psychology from Ohio University, which gave her greater standing with the people she lobbied.Her relentless but gentle style of advocacy continued until her retirement in 2007.“Providing guidance to families nationally was obviously spectacular,” said Stephen Edelson, executive director of the Autism Research Institute. “But she was also one of the first people to talk about medical comorbidities associated with autism, like seizures, sleep problems and gastrointestinal problems. And she was one of the first to point to the importance of providing services to adults with autism.”Jimmie Beirne, chief executive of the Autism Services Center (the position Dr. Sullivan held from 1979 to 2007), was hired 33 years ago to work part time with Joseph on developing his social skills.“The philosophy that she worked so hard to instill in us was to have a parent’s perspective, to think as if this is our child receiving these services,” Dr. Beirne said by phone. “She’d say that the difference between good and excellent services is in the details, and, like a good coach, she had an eye for details.”Today, Joseph lives in a group home run by the Autism Services Center and works at the Autism Training Center.In addition to Joseph and her daughter Lydia, Dr. Sullivan is survived by her other sons, Larry, Richard and Christopher; her other daughters, Julie Sullivan, who is writing a book about her mother, and Eva Sullivan; her sisters, Geraldine Landry, Frances Buckingham and Julie Miller; her brother, Charles; 12 grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.Dr. Sullivan’s influence was international. She received letters from parents around the world in search of solutions for their children, and she traveled widely to speak about autism.“She was invited to a conference on autism in Argentina in the 1990s,” her daughter Julie said by phone. “At the time, Argentina was in the grips of the ‘refrigerator mother’ thing, and she got together with parents and told them they needed to start their own group. So she’s the godmother of an autism parents’ group in Argentina.”

Her focus was on immunology and how to predict and diagnose the outcomes of transplants. She was, a colleague said, “a great researcher and a great mentor to many people.”Dr. Barbara Murphy, a leading nephrologist who specialized in advanced research that focused on predicting and diagnosing the outcomes of kidney transplants, died on Wednesday at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan, where she had worked since 1997. She was 56.The cause was glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer, her husband, Peter Fogarty, said.Dr. Murphy blended a passion for research into kidney transplant immunology with her role, since 2012, as the chairwoman of the department of medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (and its broader health system). She was the first woman named to run a department of medicine at an academic medical center in New York City.“In baseball, they talk about five-tool players,” Dr. Dennis S. Charney, dean of the Icahn School, said by phone. “I don’t know how many tools she had, but she was a very strong administrator, a great researcher and a great mentor to many people.”Dr. Murphy, who was from Ireland, developed her interest in kidney transplantation while attending medical school at the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin. She was drawn especially to how it transformed patients’ lives.“I love seeing how well patients do afterward,” she told Irish America magazine in 2016. “For all the years that I’ve been in this profession, the interaction between a living donor and a recipient in the recovery room still makes me proud to be a physician and to play a part in such a life-affirming moment.”After being recruited to Mount Sinai in 1997, she joined other researchers in examining the role of H.I.V. in kidney disease and helped establish the viability of kidney transplants for patients with H.I.V. In a speech at the Royal College in 2018, she recalled that there had been criticism of such transplants — as if there were a “moral hierarchy when it came to donor kidneys.”She added, “Two weeks ago, we received an email from one of our patients, thanking us on his 15th renal transplant birthday.”More recently, Dr. Murphy’s research at her laboratory at Mount Sinai focused on the genetics and genomics of predicting the results of transplants, and on why some kidneys are rejected.In findings reported in The Lancet in 2016, she and her collaborators said they had identified a set of 13 genes that predicted which patients would subsequently develop fibrosis, a hallmark of chronic kidney disease, and, ultimately, irreversible damage to the transplanted organ. Being able to predict which patients were at risk, they wrote, would allow for treatment to prevent fibrosis.Her research has been licensed to two companies. One, Verici DX, which is still in validation trials in advance of commercial sales, is developing RNA signature tests to determine how a patient is responding to, and will respond to, a transplant. The other company, Renalytix, uses an algorithm guided by artificial intelligence to identify a kidney disease risk score for patients. Dr. Murphy served on the boards of both companies.“Barbara was foundational to Verici,” Sara Barrington, the company’s chief executive, said by phone. She added, “Her lab will continue to file new discoveries out of her base research.”Dr. Murphy in 2014. “For all the years that I’ve been in this profession,” she once said, “the interaction between a living donor and a recipient in the recovery room still makes me proud to be a physician.”Roger Tully, via Mount Sinai Health SystemBarbara Therese Murphy was born on Oct. 15, 1964, in South Dublin. Her father, John, owned an airfreight company, and her mother, Anne (Duffy) Murphy, worked with him and also designed bridal wear.At age 4, Dr. Murphy recalled in a speech at a health care awards dinner sponsored by Irish America in 2016, she had to overcome a harsh judgment by a teacher.“My elementary school teacher told my mother I was a dunce and I would never be anything, and what’s more she shouldn’t even try,” she said. “Fortunately, my parents persevered.”After earning her medical degree at the Royal College in 1989, Dr. Murphy completed her residency and a nephrology fellowship at Beaumont Hospital, also in Dublin. She was also a nephrology fellow in the renal division of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, where she trained in transplant immunology.In 1997, she was recruited to Mount Sinai as director of transplant nephrology by Dr. Paul Klotman, then the chief of the division of nephrology, who promoted her to his former position in 2003 after he had become chairman of Icahn’s department of medicine.“She showed a lot of promise in transplant nephrology, which was emerging at the time,” Dr. Klotman, now the president of the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, said by phone. “Over the years, she developed good leadership skills: She was very organized and task oriented.”In the spring of 2020, Dr. Murphy, like other physicians, noticed with alarm that Covid-19 was much more than a respiratory disease. It was causing a surge in kidney failure that led to shortages of machines, supplies and personnel needed for emergency dialysis.The number of patients needing dialysis “is orders of magnitude greater than the number of patients we normally dialyze,” she told The New York Times.One of Mount Sinai’s responses to the pandemic that May was to open the Center for Post-Covid Care for patients recovering from the virus. At the time, Mount Sinai had treated more than 8,000 patients who had been diagnosed with Covid-19.“Barbara was instrumental in forming the center,” Dr. Charney said, “and she was involved in the follow-up as it related to kidney disease caused by Covid.”Dr. Murphy was given the Young Investigator Award in Basic Science from the American Society of Transplantation in 2003 and was named nephrologist of the year by the American Kidney Fund in 2011. At her death, she was president-elect of the American Society of Nephrology.In addition to her husband, Dr. Murphy is survived by their son, Gavin; her sister, Dr. Celine Murphy, a cardiologist who works in occupational health; her brother, Dr. Kieran Murphy, an interventional neuroradiologist; and her parents.Dr. Murphy said she had learned an indelible lesson about the need for a strong patient-doctor relationship while still in medical school.“Scholarship alone was not enough,” she said at the Irish America award ceremony. “An example: If we had a patient with rheumatoid arthritis and we shook their hands and they winced, it didn’t matter how much we knew about the disease or how to treat it, we’d failed our exam because we hadn’t taken the patient’s overall well-being into consideration.”

She won three gold medals in the 1960s but was the focus of speculation about her gender. She retired after pulling out of a track meet that would have required a sex test.Tamara Press, a dominant Soviet shot-putter and discus thrower who won three Olympic gold medals in the 1960s but was the focus of speculation about her gender because of her physique, died on April 26. She was 83.Her death was announced by the Russian Ministry of Sport, which did not specify where she died or cite the cause.Press, who was 5-foot-11 and 225 pounds, began to attract international notice in 1958, when she won the gold medal in the discus and the bronze in the shot-put at the European Athletic Championships in Stockholm.More success followed. At the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome, she won a gold medal in the shot-put and a silver in the discus. Four years later, at the Summer Olympics in Tokyo, she set Olympic records while winning gold medals in both events.But Press and her sister, Irina — who won gold medals in the 80-meter hurdles in Rome and in the pentathlon in Tokyo — received more than glory from their athletic careers.They heard cruel taunts about their size, some of it from sportswriters who compared Tamara to a defensive tackle. She and Irina were sometimes called the “Press brothers.”“I’m a champion, but you can see I’m a woman,” Tamara Press told The Associated Press in 1964. “The fact that a girl is a sportswoman has nothing to do with femininity.”Press throwing the discus at the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo. She won gold medals that year in both the discus and the shot-put. Rolls Press/Popperfoto, via Popperfoto, via Getty ImagesSeven decades later, a contentious debate continues in track and field regarding the eligibility of intersex athletes — those born with sex characteristics that do not conform to binary descriptions of male and female.Caster Semenya, a two-time Olympic champion at 800 meters, has been challenging, so far without success, the rules of World Athletics, track and field’s governing body, which require intersex athletes who identify as female to suppress their natural testosterone levels below that of men before being able to compete in women’s races from a quarter-mile to a mile.World Athletics has acknowledged that the restrictions are discriminatory, but nonetheless said they’re necessary to provide a level playing field during competition. Critics, including the World Medical Association and the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, have called the rules unnecessary and humiliating.In 1966, when Press was 29, her career (as well as her sister’s) came to a near-total end when they decided to withdraw from the European Athletics Championships in Budapest.It is not clear why Press decided to withdraw. Had she taken anabolic steroids to gain strength, endurance and bulk, she might have aroused suspicion, but she would not have faced little risk of being detected, because drug testing was in its infancy in those days.If she was intersex, Press might have feared failing a new test instituted at the athletics championships: the so-called nude parade, which required women athletes to appear before a medical panel that would determine their eligibility.“There was something different about the Press sisters,” said John Hoberman, a historian of doping in sports and the author of “Testosterone Dreams: Rejuvenation, Aphrodisia, Doping” (2005). He added that it was “not out of the question” that both things were true — that the sisters were intersex and that they also used steroids.All Soviet officials would say about the sisters’ absence from the meet is that they had to stay at home to care for their sick mother.Tamara Natanovna Press was born on May 10, 1937, in Kharkov, Ukraine, and lived there until her family was evacuated to Samarkand, Uzbekistan, early in World War II. Her father was in the Soviet military and died in battle in 1942. At 18, Tamara moved to Leningrad to train under Viktor Aleksyev, a renowned track and field coach.From 1959 to 1965, Press set 11 world records, including her personal bests: 18.59 meters (or 60.9 feet) in the shot-put and 59.70 meters (195.9 feet) in the discus.Press, lying down, with her sister, Irina, in an undated photo. Irina Press won gold medals in the 80-meter hurdles at the 1960 Rome Olympics and the pentathlon in Tokyo in 1964.Ullstein Bild/ullstein bild, via Getty ImagesFollowing the Press sisters’ decision not to compete in Budapest, Tamara Press stayed active until 1967. At one of her last meets, the Moskow Spartakiad, an all-Soviet event that did not require gender testing, she won the shot-put. She retired later that year.In the years after she stopped competing, Press worked as an engineer and a coach. In 1996 she worked to help re-elect Boris Yeltsin as Russia’s president. She was also the vice president of the Physical Culture and Health Fund, a charity that helps promising Russian athletes, and the author of several books, including “The Price of Victory.”In 2012, President Vladimir Putin wished Press a happy 75th birthday, saying in a statement, “You earned the respect of opponents and the love of millions of fans.”Information about her survivors was not immediately available. Her sister died in 2004.In 1996, as the Summer Olympics were taking place in Atlanta, Press told The Christian Science Monitor that her success in the 1960 and 1964 Games “was a victory for our country,” adding, “Communism — that’s another question.”And she recalled that she was so focused at the Tokyo Olympics that at some point she was unaware that one of her competitors had dropped the shot on her thigh.“There was so much tension that I didn’t even notice,” she said. “After the competition I saw a black mark on my leg and thought, ‘What’s this?’”

A quadruple amputee, he was a relentless defender on the United States’ wheelchair rugby team, which won a gold medal at the 2008 Paralympics in Beijing.Nick Springer, who became a Paralympic gold medalist in wheelchair rugby at Beijing in 2008, only nine years after contracting meningococcal meningitis, which caused the partial amputations of his arms and legs, died on April 14 in Chandler, Ariz., a suburb of Phoenix. He was 35.His father, Gary, said that Springer, who lived in Phoenix, died in a friend’s pool after finishing a lap. A cause of death has not yet been determined, but he had been seeing a cardiologist for an arrhythmia.Wheelchair rugby — also known as “Murderball,” which was the title of a 2005 documentary about the sport — suited Springer’s love of rough-and-tumble action. He had played hockey from age 5 or 6, hoping to become a New York Ranger.In 2000, a year after losing parts of his arms and his legs above the knees, he turned to sled hockey while still in rehabilitation. He later took up wheelchair rugby, an often violent sport that contains elements of traditional rugby, basketball and handball.“A lot of people look at me like I’m fragile,” Springer told The New York Times in 2003. “Sports gives me a chance to get out there and bang myself up.”After Springer tried wheelchair rugby for the first time in 2003, “He rolled off the court with an ear-to-ear grin, saying, ‘Dad, I think I can be really good at this,’” said Gary Springer, who drove Nick from their home in Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y., in Westchester County, to Hackensack, N.J., where he practiced, and to tournaments where he competed with a team from the Eastern Paralyzed Veterans Association (now the United States Spinal Association).He excelled quickly: He joined the development squad of USA Wheelchair Rugby, the sport’s governing body, in the spring of 2005, and made the U.S. national team the next year, when it won the gold medal at the world championships. In 2008, the team won the Canada Cup and the gold medal over Australia at the Paralympics in Beijing.“He was a great defender — probably for a long period of time the best defender in the world,” said Scott Hogsett, a friend and a teammate of Springer’s on the 2008 team. “He’s the main reason we won the gold; he defended one of the best players in the world” — the Australian wheelchair rugby star Ryley Batt — and shut him down.”But the victory in China came amid sadness. Springer’s mother, Nancy (Ford) Springer, was dying of cancer while her husband and their daughter, Olivia, were at the Paralympics.When she first learned she had cancer, in January 2008, Springer had offered to stop playing wheelchair rugby and move home.“She looked me in the eye and said, ‘It would crush me if you don’t go to the Olympics,’” he said, recalling her conversation to The Journal News, a newspaper based in White Plains, N.Y., in 2008. “And she said, ‘The one thing you have to promise is that you won’t let this keep you from winning the gold medal.’”Ms. Springer was in a coma, surrounded by friends and family watching the gold medal game on a laptop and hearing the announcer refer to her son as “Nick the Tank.” She died the next day, before her son, husband and daughter got home.The gold medal, Springer said, was how he would remember her.“It’s my mother’s medal,” he told The Journal News.Springer playing sled hockey in 2003. “A lot of people look at me like I’m fragile,” he said. “Sports gives me a chance to get out there and bang myself up.”Dith Pran/The New York TimesNicholas Bowen Springer was born on June 9, 1985, in Manhattan and grew up in Brooklyn and Croton-on-Hudson. His father is an entertainment publicist, and his mother taught deaf children and was one of several founders of the National Meningitis Association.Springer had hockey on his mind in August 1999. He had just completed two weeks of goaltender camp near Toronto — he was going to play the position on his high school’s junior varsity team that fall — and was attending sleepaway camp in western Massachusetts.After a three-day, 30-mile hike, he began feeling flulike symptoms, which continued to worsen over the next 16 hours. Purple blotches appeared on his abdomen, indicating blood clots. All were symptoms of meningococcal meningitis, a bacterial infection that causes swelling of the protective membranes that cover the brain and spinal cord.Up to one in five people who survive meningitis may suffer amputations, deafness, and brain and kidney damage; 10 to 15 percent die, even with rapid treatment, according to the National Meningitis Association.Springer was sent to a hospital in Pittsfield, Mass., then was quickly airlifted to another in Springfield, where his organs began to fail and his blood pressure fell to almost zero. He was given a 10 percent chance of survival.He was transferred to a hospital in Manhattan, where, while he was in a medically induced coma that would last eight weeks, he underwent the amputations.After awakening, according to the 2003 New York Times article, he told his father: “Dad, I don’t think I have any fingers. I think I know about my legs, too.” Mr. Springer recalled: “My wife and I looked at each other and said, ‘This is our new normal.’ Because Nick is alive. He’s still Nick.”Springer declined to wear prosthetics or use an electric wheelchair. And he played wheelchair rugby relentlessly.“At a very high level, it can be really violent, and that’s what people like about it,” his friend Scott Hogsett said. “Who doesn’t want to watch two people crash in wheelchairs as hard as you can?”Springer was named the 2009 athlete of the year by the United States Quad Rugby Association, which oversees a league of local teams like the ones he played for in Sarasota, Fla., and in Phoenix, where Hogsett was a teammate. He was also on the 2010 world championship team and the 2012 Paralympic team that won a bronze medal.“Nick was just ferocious,” Joe Delagrave, a teammate on the 2012 Paralympic team, said. “We met in 2009 and he got me playing at a high level. He was phenomenal at mentoring people and loving them.”In addition to his father, Springer is survived by his sister, Olivia McCall, and his father’s partner, Elizabeth Cier.Springer, who graduated from Eckerd College in St. Petersburg in 2010 with a bachelor’s degree in communications, had been an advocate for vaccine awareness. He began speaking at colleges and community organizations and to health professionals in 2005 on behalf of the meningitis association and Novartis, which made a vaccine. In 2015, he began speaking exclusively to health workers after Novartis sold most of its vaccine business to GlaxoSmithKline.“He talked,” his father said, “about before he got sick, getting sick, and how his parents didn’t know there was a vaccination that could have prevented it.”

In 1966, he found heat-resistant bacteria in a hot spring at Yellowstone National Park. That led to the development of the chemical process behind the test for Covid-19.Thomas Brock, a microbiologist, was driving west to a laboratory in Washington State in 1964 when he stopped off at Yellowstone National Park.“I’d never seen Yellowstone before,” he said in an interview in 2017. “I came in the south entrance, got out of my car, and there were all these thermal areas spreading out from the hot springs into the lake. I was stunned by the microbes that were living in the hot springs, and nobody seemed to know anything about them.”What fascinated him, on what would be the first of many trips to Yellowstone, were the blue-green algae living in a hot spring — proof that some life could tolerate temperatures above the boiling point of water.It was the beginning of research that led to a revolutionary find in 1966: a species of bacteria that he called Thermus aquaticus, which thrived at 70 degrees Celsius (158 degrees Fahrenheit) or more.The yellow bacteria — discovered by Dr. Brock and Hudson Freeze, his undergraduate assistant at Indiana University — survived because all their enzymes are stable at very high temperatures, including one, Taq polymerase, that replicates its own DNA and was essential to the invention of the process behind the gold standard in Covid-19 testing.Dr. Brock died on April 4 at his home in Madison, Wis. He was 94.His wife, Katherine (Middleton) Brock, known as Kathie, said the cause was complications of a fall.Thermus aquaticus was used in the 1980s by the biochemist Kary B. Mullis to help create the polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, which earned him a share of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.Dr. Brock made his discovery after he became fascinated by the blue-green algae living in a hot spring. They offered proof that some life tolerated temperatures above the boiling point of water.Thomas Brock“I remember running into Mullis at a meeting,” Dr. Freeze, now the director of the human genetics program at Sanford-Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute in San Diego, said in an interview. “And I said, ‘I’m the guy who found Thermus aquaticus with Tom Brock,’ and he said that he used the very strain that we isolated in Yellowstone.” (Dr. Brock had deposited cultures at the American Type Culture Collection in Gaithersburg, Md.)The PCR technology, which requires cycles of extreme heating and cooling, can multiply small segments of DNA millions or even billions of times in a short period. It has proved crucial in many ways, including the identification of DNA at a crime scene and, more recently, detecting whether someone has Covid-19.“PCR is fundamental to everything we do in molecular biology today,” said Yuka Manabe, a professor of medicine in the division of infectious diseases at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. “Mullis couldn’t have done PCR without a rock-stable enzyme.”Thomas Dale Brock was born on Sept. 10, 1926, in Cleveland. His father, Thomas, an engineer who ran the boiler room at a hospital, died when Tom was 15, pushing him and his mother, Helen (Ringwald) Brock, a nurse, into poverty. Tom, an only child, took jobs in stores to help her.When he was a teenager, his interest in chemistry led him to set up a small laboratory with a friend in the loft of a barn behind his house in Chillicothe, Ohio, where he and his mother lived after his father’s death. They experimented there with explosives and toxic gas.After serving in the Navy’s electronics training program, Dr. Brock earned three degrees at Ohio State University: a bachelor’s in botany and a master’s and Ph.D. in mycology, the study of fungi.With faculty jobs in short supply, Dr. Brock spent five years as a research microbiologist at the Upjohn Company before he was hired as an assistant professor of biology at Western Reserve University (now Case Western Reserve University) in Cleveland. After two years, he became a postdoctoral fellow in the university’s medical school. In 1960, he joined the department of bacteriology at Indiana University, Bloomington, where he taught medical microbiology.When he arrived at Yellowstone, he did not have grandiose ambitions.A view of a Thermus aquaticus bacterium. It is able to survive hot temperatures because of an enzyme called Taq polymerase that protects it from heat.UW-Madison News & Public Affairs“I was just looking for a nice, simple ecosystem where I could study microbial ecology,” he said in an interview for the website of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he was a professor of natural sciences in the department of bacteriology from 1971 to 1990. “At higher temperatures, you don’t have the complications of having animals that eat all the microbes.”Stephen Zinder worked with Dr. Brock as a student from 1974 to 1977, a period that included Dr. Brock’s last summer of work at Yellowstone and his research into the ecology of Wisconsin’s lakes, including Lake Mendota in Madison.“He had an encyclopedic knowledge of microbiology and science in general,” said Dr. Zinder, now a professor of microbiology at Cornell University. “He was always learning and picking up new things.” He added, “I think his real ability was to see things simply and to figure out simple techniques to find out what the organisms were doing in their environment.”Dr. Brock wrote or edited numerous books, including “Milestones in Microbiology” (1961); “Biology of Microorganisms” (1970), now in its 16th edition; and “A Eutrophic Lake: Lake Mendota, Wisconsin” (1985).After retiring from the University of Wisconsin, Dr. Brock focused on ecological strategies to restore oak savanna, prairie and marshland on 140 acres that he and his wife had purchased in Black Earth, Wis., about 35 minutes from Madison.Dr. Brock in 2013 at the Pleasant Valley Conservancy in Black Earth, Wis. He and his wife, the microbiologist Katherine (Middleton) Brock, restored 140 acres of oak savanna, prairie and marshland there.Jeff Miller/UW-MadisonThe land, initially intended as a place for their two children to play, later became the Pleasant Valley Conservancy.“It was less expensive than land nearer Madison, and it turned out to be more interesting,” said Mrs. Brock, who is also a microbiologist.In addition to his wife, Dr. Brock is survived by their daughter, Emily Brock, and their son, Brian. His first marriage, to Mary Louise Louden, ended in divorceTo Dr. Brock, the discovery of Thermus aquaticus exemplified the benefits of being given the freedom to perform fundamental research without fixating on practical results.“It’s kind of an interesting story,” he told Wyoming Public Radio in 2020, “how research that was being done for just basic research, trying to find out what kind of weird critters might be living in boiling water in Yellowstone,” would eventually lead to “extremely widespread practical applications.”

His death leaves only one family physician in Greenfield, Mo. He died of complications of Covid-19.This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here.For the past 15 years, there were only two family physicians in Greenfield, Mo., a town with 1,371 residents about 40 miles northwest of Springfield. One of them was Dr. Michael Bennett, who opened his practice, the Greenfield Medical Center, in 2005.He was a vigorous proponent of wearing masks and of social distancing during the coronavirus pandemic, though he faced resistance to his calls from some townspeople, and he offered free Covid-19 testing to his patients with funding help from the federal C.A.R.E.S. Act.Dr. Bennet took precautions in treating infected patients but nevertheless tested positive for the coronavirus in late December. He was soon hospitalized in St. Louis and spent 50 days connected to a ventilator and an ECMO (extracorporeal membrane oxygenation), a machine that acts as an artificial lung. He died of Covid-19 on March 6, his former wife, Teresa Bennett, said. He was 52.Since the start of the pandemic, Dade County, Mo., where Greenfield is situated, has recorded 715 positive tests and 31 deaths, most of the fatalities nursing home residents, according to Pamela Cramer, the administrator of the county health department. “It’s really hit us, but not as hard as other areas,” she said on Wednesday.Nationwide, 452,706 health care workers have tested positive for the coronavirus, and 1,505 have died as of March 26, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.Michael Keith Bennett was born on Feb. 15, 1969, in New London, Mo., in the northeast part of the state. His father, Bob, was a farmer; his mother, Meredith (Arnold) Bennett, most recently helped manage her son’s clinic.A head injury from a car accident when he was in high school changed Dr. Bennett’s career path.“He was hurt pretty badly, and during that stay in the hospital he decided he wanted to be a doctor,” Ms. Bennett said by phone. “He was into auto mechanics before that.”After earning a bachelor’s degree in biology from the University of Missouri in Columbia, he received his medical degree from its medical school. And after finishing his residency at Cox Medical Center South in Springfield, he worked at St John’s Hospital in nearby Willard, Mo.In addition to his medical practice, which has been shuttered, Dr. Bennett had a 500-acre farm with beef cattle, and he enjoyed fishing and hunting.“I think one of the reasons his patients loved him is he was a good old boy,” said Ms. Bennett, who managed her former husband’s practice until 2012, when they divorced.In addition to his parents, he is survived by his son, Austin; his daughter, Shelby Bennett; his sister, Veronica Bennett; his brother, Damon; and his girlfriend, Haley Hendrixson.Dr. Bennett worked closely with Ms. Cramer, the county official, and suggested to her last year that the town adopt a mask-wearing mandate after several Covid-related nursing home deaths. But the idea did not advance.After learning that Dr. Bennett had tested positive for Covid-19, Ms. Cramer tried to stay in contact. In his final text to her from the hospital, on Jan. 8, he wrote: “I’m hanging in there. Will stay in touch.”

A machine that acted as an artificial lung kept her eligible for a transplant as she dealt with cystic fibrosis. She went on to compete again in marathons.Liesbeth Stoeffler’s doctors had a bold decision to make in 2009. Ms. Stoeffler was on a ventilator and deeply sedated after cystic fibrosis had destroyed the lungs that had once given her the ability to run and hike.She needed a double-lung transplant, but doctors worried that prolonged time on the respirator might render her too weak or malnourished to stay eligible for one.So doctors at Columbia University Irving Medical Center took her off the ventilator after about a day and hooked her to an extracorporeal membrane oxygenation machine, or ECMO, which pumped blood from her body, removed carbon dioxide from it and sent oxygen-rich blood flowing back into her. In effect, it acted as an artificial lung.It was a rarely known and risky deployment of the machine, but not only did it allow Ms. Stoeffler to awaken from sedation; it also allowed her to eat, speak on her smartphone, exercise in bed and walk in place while she was connected to it — for an unusually long 18 days, until the transplant took place.“The ECMO was the bridge between my respiratory failure and the transplant,” Ms. Stoeffler told USA Today in 2009.ECMO — a treatment for lung-damaging viruses — has proved extremely helpful in the past with cases of H1N1 flu (or swine flu) and is now being widely used at major medical centers in the Covid-19 pandemic, according to data from Columbia and other ECMO centers around the world. A study published in the medical journal The Lancet last September showed that 62.6 percent of 1,035 severely ill Covid-19 patients survived after receiving ECMO treatments.Ms. Stoeffler’s transplanted lungs worked well for nearly a decade, enabling her to hike in the mountains near her childhood home in Austria and finish two New York City Marathons,half-marathons, an Ironman bicycle course and a sprint triathlon.But her body eventually rejected the transplanted lungs, and she underwent another transplant in 2019. It did not work as well or last as long. Ms. Stoeffler died of cystic fibrosis on March 4 at the Irving Medical Center, her brother Ewald Stoffler said. She was 61.Liesbeth Stoeffler was born on June 18, 1959, in Hermagor, Austria, a town at the foot of the Carnic Alps. Her father, Johann, was a truck driver; her mother, Margarethe (Strempfl) Stoeffler, was a homemaker.After finishing trade school, she left Austria in 1977 for an au pair job in Manhattan, where she had hoped to move since she was young, her brother said in an email.“During the first three years Liesbeth spent in New York, she refused to speak a single word of German,” Mr. Stoeffler wrote, “so she can learn English as fast and as good as possible.”She took classes in computers and graphic design and was hired by Deutsche Bank, the Blackstone Group and finally the investment management firm Sanford C. Bernstein (now AllianceBernstein). She worked there for nearly 20 years, rising to vice president and presentation specialist and creating graphics for marketing and sales documents.She began to experience breathing problems while at Bernstein and learned she had cystic fibrosis in 1995. But she kept it largely to herself.“She was always coughing, causing her co-workers to ask her to check it out,” said Christina Restivo, a close friend who had met her at Bernstein and was the leader of a support team of friends who looked after her. “She kept it private until she was so far along that the only way to live was with a double transplant.”In June 2009, after a routine blood test at the hospital, Ms. Stoeffler felt too exhausted to return home. One of her doctors, David Lederer, a pulmonologist, admitted her.“Within 48 hours, she was in the I.C.U., on a ventilator,” he said in a video about her case made by the Irving Medical Center. He added, “She wasn’t really improving on the vent support we were providing for her, so we knew we had to do something for her.”Using the ECMO helped her remain eligible for the transplant. “About five days into it, she told me it was the best she’d felt in years,” Dr. Matthew Bacchetta, who also treated Ms. Stoeffler, told a Columbia online publication.In less than two years, Ms. Stoeffler began running races in earnest. Starting with the Fred Lebow Classic, a five-mile race in Central Park in January 2011 (named after the founder of the New York City Marathon), she finished 47 different races hosted by the New York Road Runners club. Her last one was an 8-kilometer event in August 2017.Ms. Restivo said that her friend’s running had probably extended the life of her transplanted lungs.“Because your immune system is so suppressed by having a transplant, she was told not to exercise in a gym, where she could pick up bacteria,” she said. “She used the outdoors to exercise her lungs.”In addition to her brother Ewald, Ms. Stoeffler is survived by three sisters, Gabriele and Birgit Stoeffler and Waltraud Wildpanner; and another brother, Hannes.Ms. Restivo, who is the executor of Ms. Stoeffler’s will, said Ms. Stoeffler would sometimes text with instructions to give the doctors. Another text arrived on her last day.“I got a call to go to the hospital at 3:30 a.m. in the morning,” she said. “Liesbeth, with her oxygen mask on, was still alert, texting me as usual, telling me what to do and keeping me advised of her status. Fully cognizant at all times.”