Dead, Not Forgotten

Art Davis was a brilliant black bassist who acquired a doctorate in clinical psychology when his music career waned in the 1970s due to the pressures of racism in the music industry.

Davis showed an interest in music early on, playing tuba and piano and eventually switching to bass in high school in Harrisburg, PA. After graduation he moved to New York to study under scholarships at both the Manhattan School of Music and the Juilliard School of Music. He earned a B.A. degree with a triple major in psychology, music and physics from Hunter College, City University of New York.

Art Davis fashioned a musical career that took dual paths into jazz and orchestral work. But from a practical point of view it was hard to maintain a double personality when it had to apply both to the racially accepting world of jazz and the conservative world of “serious” music. He got an early taste of the latter when at age 17 he was unreasonably criticized by the audition committee of his hometown orchestra. The conductor, Edwin MacArthur, was taken aback and questioned their decision. He was even more taken aback when he learned that their objection was that he was black. To his great credit, Edwin MacArthur said, “If you don’t want him, then you don’t want me.” Davis was accepted.

Art Davis’ recording debut came in 1958 at the Newport Jazz Festival, with Max Roach. The group included George Coleman and Booker Little, who became one of his best friends. Soon after Art Davis met John Coltrane while working with Max Roach’s group at Small’s Paradise in Harlem. That started a musical collaboration, one that Davis considered the richest in his life, which would last until Coltrane’s death in 1967. Davis performed on the saxophonist’s albums Ascension, Volumes 1 and 2 of The Africa/Brass Sessions, and Ole Coltrane. Davis also performed with musicians as diverse as Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Louis Armstrong, Judy Garland, John Denver, Bob Dylan and Peter, Paul and Mary.

On the orchestral track, Art Davis performed with the National Symphony, NBC Symphony, New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Radio City Music Hall Symphony, Westchester Symphony and the Orange County Symphony, among others.

However, in the 1970s Davis decided to expose his experience of racism in the music industry and launched a job discrimination lawsuit against the New York Philharmonic. Though the lawsuit was unsuccessful in the courts, it did help musicians who came after him because it helped to establish the practice of “blind auditions” where the auditioning judges can only hear the player, not see them.

The other result was that Davis was blacklisted and could no longer find sufficient work as a musician. The jazz pianist Ahmad Jamal once called Davis a “forgotten genius” because of it.

So, Art Davis decided it was time to put “Dr.” in front of his name and returned to college to pursue his parallel love of psychology. He received a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from New York University 1982 and practiced in New York until moving to Southern California in 1986. There Davis taught music in college, maintained a professional psychology practice and played live and on recordings until his death.

Art Davis died July 29, 2007 at age 73 at his home in Long Beach, CA of a heart attack.

For more information:
Visit ArtDavis.com
Read an Art Davis biography on the Verve Records site

Popularity: 35%

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%

Older readers of this blog will remember the days when Polio, and its eradication, were on the minds of everyone. In the 1940s and 1950s hundreds of thousands cases of Polio constituted a viral invasion of the nation. After the development of an effective killed-virus version of a vaccine by Jonas Salk at the University of Pittsburgh, the fight was popularized by The March of Dimes, then known as the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis. Though the Salk vaccine was replaced after eight years by the more common oral vaccine used now, it led the battle against this public health hazard that forced many to live their lives confined to an iron lung.

So, who was the first to administer the Salk vaccine? Richard Mulvaney, a Virginia physician who died October 26, 2006 of congestive heart failure in Fairfax, Va. He was 88. He was the first of many volunteers to administer the vaccine in its public trials. His first patient, 6-year-old Randy Kerr of Falls Church, Va. became instantly famous when a photo of his April 26, 1954 inoculation was sent over news wires to papers nationwide.

The U.S. saw its last wild virus in 1979 and the Americas region was certified Polio free in 1994. Still, sporadic occurances of the virus occur to this day in the U.S. and Polio is still a major health problem in a number of regions in the world.

Popularity: 19%

Only one doctor, Jane Hodgson, has ever been convicted for performing an illegal abortion in a hospital. Before the Supreme Court handed down its landmark decision in Roe v. Wade in January 1973, abortion was illegal in most states as it was in Minnesota where Dr. Hodgson had a busy practice as an obstetrician and gynecologist. In April 1970, when Dr. Hodgson agreed to perform an abortion in order to challenge Minnesota’s law, abortion was permitted in the state only to save the woman’s life. The patient had contracted German Measles early in the term of her fourth pregnancy, and though her life was not in danger a high chance of serious birth defects was present.

Hodgson was brought to trial in November 1970 and was sentenced to 30 days in jail and a year’s probation. Her sentence was suspended pending appeal and her conviction was overturned after the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision. She served no jail time.

Dr. Hodgson died at age 91 at her home in Rochester, Minnesota on October 23 2006.

For more information:
http://www.abanet.org/irr/hr/spring03/humanrightshero.html
http://www.voicesofchoice.org/transcripts/jane_hodgson.shtml
http://www.amwa-doc.org/index.cfm?objectid=70BF083A-D567-0B25-516B2E0AD739A35B

Popularity: 25%