Dead, Not Forgotten

Renowned British scientists Anne McLaren and her ex-husband Donald Michie died together July 7, 2007 in a solo car crash on England’s M11 while they were traveling from Cambridge to London. Their car left the road and hit a tree.

Anne McLaren and Donald Michie met and married in 1952 while students at Oxford. Anne was Donald’s second wife (his first marriage ended in divorce in 1949.) He and McLaren divorced in 1959 but resumed their relationship and shared a house after the death of Michie’s third wife from cancer in 2002.

Given each of their pioneering, independent impacts on some of the most notable technologies of our times, they could easily be seen as a couple of the future from a scientific point of view. Personally it was the same, even though they divorced early on, they ended up back together again late in life. And of course, as said above, they were together at the time of their deaths. They are a love story of modern times.

Dame Anne McLaren, developmental biologist and embryo expert.

In 1958, as part of an effort to distinguish between the effects of genes on an embryo’s development and any effects that the host uterus may introduce, Anne McLaren and John D. Biggers, removed mouse embryos and held them in culture for a period of time before implanting them in the uterus of another mouse. The outcome was an offspring that had a different number of vertebrae than the genetic mother, indicating an unknown influence in the host uterus and a great advance in our understanding of reproduction.

Her husband Michie worked together with her in these formative years developing techniques for transplanting embryos to in-vitro fertilization. Between the birth of Louise Brown, the first test tube baby born in 1978 in England, and today, more than 115,000 in vitro births have occurred in the United States alone.

Another area of investigation for Anne McLaren was chimeras in mice. According to Wikipedia, a chimera is “an animal that has two or more different populations of genetically distinct cells that originated in different zygotes. ” McClaren’s book, Mammalian Chimaeras (1976), is an important work in the field. A later book, Germ Cells and Soma: A New Look at an Old Problem (1980), was also held in esteem.

Increasingly she was asked to comment on the ethical questions surrounding biological research. Anne McLaren favored using both adult stem-cell lines and human embryos, as one may yield results that the other may not. In 2001 she wrote in the journal Nature: “Let a thousand stem cell lines bloom — but let them bloom in full view of all…so that they can be subject to scientific and ethical review, freely available for research and one day, perhaps, for treating diseases.” I’m guessing that Anne McLaren may also have been a gardener.

Donald Michie, Artificial Intelligence (AI) Expert.

During WWII, Michie attended the School of Codes and Ciphers in Bedford, England where he was trained in cryptography. Soon he was transfered to Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire, where he was assigned to the “Testery”, a group working on solving the German high-level teleprinter cipher, code-named Fish.

There Michie met and befriended Alan Turing, a coworker at the Testery who eventually went on to be regarded as the father of modern computer science. The two spent hours discussing the possibility that computers could be programmed to display intelligence. It was these discussions that formed the basis of his groundbreaking work in Artificial Intelligence.

Michie’s greatest achievement at the “Testery” came in April 1944 when he invented a technique that used the Colossus computer (an early computer developed there during the war) to automatically decode the secondary wheel of the Lorentz machine, the machine the Germans used for encoding Fish. His invention gave the Allied Forces a substantial advantage by radically reducing the time needed to decode German messages.

After the war Michie attained a DPhil in mammalian genetics from Oxford, where he and Anne McLaren met and fell in love. They worked together in the 1950’s pioneering techniques related to in-vitro fertilization at London University and at University of Edinburgh.

Michie’s attention returned to the field of Artificial Intelligence in the early 1960s, after his divorce from Anne McLaren in 1959.

To determine whether computers could be programmed to learn from experience, Donald Michie developed a game playing machine called Menace, for which he developed a general-purpose learning algorithm called Boxes. Because no computers were available to him in the early 196o’s, he hand-simulated the Boxes algorithm, using a device made from an assembly of matchboxes. Menace stood for Matchbox Educable Noughts And Crosses Engine and it well demonstrated the capability of machines to learn and apply feedback to achieve continued learning.

By 1963 Michie had formed an artificial-intelligence research group in Edinburgh. With the support of the Edinburgh vice-chancellor, Sir Edward Appleton, Michie established the Experimental Programming Unit in 1965. In 1967 he was appointed to a personal chair of machine intelligence and became the first director of the Department of Machine Intelligence and Perception. The pace continued until 1973 when circumstances conspired to quell the activity in AI research in Edinburgh and elsewhere.

His most visible achievement of the period was Freddy II, the world’s first laboratory robot that used computer vision feedback to assemble complex products from a pile of parts. Industry was not quick to catch on though and this work did not find the audience it deserved until the 1980s. Eventually manufacturing firms, like auto manufacturers in Japan, began to embrace the technologies he developed and he spent many years helping industry apply concepts regarding robotics, learning and artificial intelligence.

Having been made the head of the Turing Trust in Cambridge, Donald Michie founded the Turing Institute in Glasgow in 1986, in honor of Turing’s key contributions to the field of computer science. He continued to work after his retirement in the early 1990s.

For more information:
Read Donald Michie’s CV
View Donald Michie’s website
Read Anne McLaren’s profile at the Royal Society website

Popularity: 44%

The three-man, deep-sea diving submarine, Alvin, took us all on adventures that have fascinated people around the world since its maiden voyage in 1964. Harold (Bud) Froehlich was the vessel’s chief designer.

Harold E. Froehlich was already thinking deep after helping to build a mechanical arm for the Navy-owned bathyscaph Trieste, when in 1962 he became project manager at General Mills for the Navy/ Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute project to build the small, deep-diving submarine.

Alvin’s assignments have taken it as deep as 15,000 feet below the surface of the ocean, where it has helped find a hydrogen bomb, explored the wreckage of the RMS Titanic, discovered unimagined deep-sea animals and plants, and vicariously peered in the depths for armchair explorers everywhere.

Over Alvin’s 45 years every single piece of it has been replaced. A new generation submarine is due to replace it in the next year or so.

Always driven to “figure things out,” Harold E. Froehlich worked on diverse projects throughout his career such as high-altitude balloons and surgical equipment. He retired in Minneapolis, MN after working at 3M. He died there of cancer May 19, 2007 at age 84.

For more information:
Read about Alvin’s history and accomplishments

Popularity: 32%

The perfection of recorded sound is the pursuit of many audio engineers and revered among them was John Eargle, an award winning engineer that produced or recorded more than 275 compact disks and contributed importantly to the development of multi-channel surround sound.

John Eargle was educated in music at the Eastman School of Music and the University of Michigan. He also received degrees in engineering from the University of Texas and the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.

John Eargle was also a well know author of audio books and articles including, The Handbook of Recording Engineering, The Microphone Handbook, The Handbook of Sound System Design and The Loudspeaker Handbook. He had recently completed The JBL Story: 60 Years of Audio Innovation.

In 2002 Eargle and two other engineers were given a scientific and technical award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for development of cinema loudspeaker systems.

After a long career with the loud speaker giant, JBL, Eargle was most recently the Director of Recording for Delios, an independent recording label for whom he recorded Dvorak: Requiem and Symphony No. 9,” with Czech conductor Zdenek Macal leading the New Jersey Symphony and the Westminster Symphonic Choir. For the effort he received a Grammy Award in 2001.

John Eargle died May 9, 2007 at his home in the Hollywood Hills at age 76. He appears to have died peacefully but the cause of death has not been announced at the time of this writing.

For more information:
Read John Eargle’s bio on the Lansing Heritage web site
Read a review of a talk John Eargle gave on surround microphone techniques
Read tributes to John Eargle

Popularity: 33%

Hailed as a death ray by newspaper headline writers in 1960, Theodore H. Maiman was the first to design a functioning laser. In 1959 labs around the world were spurned on by Charles Townes’ statement that a version of his maser, a device that concentrated microwave energy into a single beam, could use visible light to the same end. Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey, where Townes worked, and Hughes Research Laboratories in Malibu, California, where Maiman worked, were both committed to the race.

Maiman’s laser cost only $50,000 to develop and, surprisingly, it worked the first time. Since its invention lasers have been used for everything from art to medicine to supermarket scanners. It was not equally successful in all of its applications though. Remember Ronald Reagan’s laser based Star Wars defense system?

Theodore H. Maiman left Hughes in 1962 to establish Korad Corporation, a laser manufacturing firm. The company was sold in 1968 to Union Carbide Corporation. He remained active in laser and optic related fields throughout his life. In recent years he worked as an adjunct professor at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia

Maiman and his wife Kathleen moved to Vancouver in the late 1990s from Santa Barbara, CA.

Born in Los Angeles on July 11, 1927, Theodore H. Maiman died May 5, 2007 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. He was 79. The cause of death was a rare and uncurable genetic disorder called systemic mastocytosis.

For more information:
IEEE’s Virtual Museum entry on Theodore H. Maiman - note the related links in the left sidebar

Popularity: 20%

John Murdock was full of inventiveness; it was something that he couldn’t resist. After all, when one resists experience they foil discovery, and discovery is the foundation of invention (other famous sayings on this topic not withstanding). The process of discovery never ended for John Murdock. He took his last engineering course in the fall of 2006.

A thoughtful inventor who was always driven by application, John Murdock spent his first 45 years in business as a co-founder of Perlite Corp, a company that manufactured equipment to expand perlite, a volcanic rock, for industrial purposes.

After retirement in 1985 Murdock joined the International Executive Service Corps and consulted for mining interests in Zimbabwe and Turkey.

Apparently John Murdock could not quit it though. Next was a lap pool that one swims in place in, and then, a driveway device that turns your vehicle around in place. Murdock understood the value of big ideas in small places.

In addition to inventions like a combination haircutter and vacuum appliance and a directional hearing aid to be used in crowds, John Murdock was concerned about global warning and had recently been developing concepts for a small sea-based nuclear reactor as a power source and was investigating the possibility of using decommissioned Russian nuclear submarines to generate electricity.

He became a pacifist, his daughter Jean Warrington said, after watching hungry German soldiers come out of hiding to trade their guns for hot food.

John Murdock died at age 87 at his Swarthmore, MA home on Feb. 16, 2007 of multiple myeloma.

Popularity: 24%