IN REMEMBRANCE: 4-10-2011

Sidney Lumet at a 2007 screening of his Film ‘Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead’ in France.
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His stepdaughter, Leslie Gimbel, said the cause was lymphoma.

“While the goal of all movies is to entertain,” Mr. Lumet once wrote, “the kind of film in which I believe goes one step further. It compels the spectator to examine one facet or another of his own conscience. It stimulates thought and sets the mental juices flowing.”

Social issues set his own mental juices flowing, and his best films not only probed the consequences of prejudice, corruption and betrayal, but also celebrated individual acts of courage.

In his first film, “12 Angry Men” (1957), he took his cameras into a jury room where the pressure mounted as one tenacious and courageous juror, played by Henry Fonda, slowly convinced the others that the defendant on trial for murder was, in fact, innocent. (Justice Sonia M. Sotomayor of the United States Supreme Court said the film had an important influence on her law career.)

Almost two decades later, Mr. Lumet’s moral sense remained acute when he ventured into satire with “Network” (1976), perhaps his most acclaimed film. Based on Paddy Chayefsky’s biting script, the film portrays a television anchorman who briefly resuscitates his fading career by launching on-air tirades against what he perceives as the hypocrisies of American society.

The film starred William Holden, Faye Dunaway and Peter Finch as the commentator turned attack dog whose proclamation to the world at large — “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!” — became part of the American vernacular.

“Network” was nominated for 10 Academy Awards, including best film and best director, and won four: best actor (Mr. Finch), best actress (Ms. Dunaway), best original screenplay (Mr. Chayefsky) and best supporting actress (Beatrice Straight).

Honorary Oscar

Yet for all the critical success of his films and despite the more than 40 Academy Award nominations they drew, Mr. Lumet (pronounced loo-MET) never won an Oscar for directing, though he was nominated four times. (The other nominations were for “12 Angry Men,” “Dog Day Afternoon” and “The Verdict.”)

Only in 2005 did the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences present him with an honorary Academy Award. Manohla Dargis, writing in The New York Times, called it a “consolation prize for a lifetime of neglect.”

In 2007, in an interview that was videotaped to accompany this obituary online, Mr. Lumet was asked how it felt to receive an Academy Award at long last. He replied, “I wanted one, damn it, and I felt I deserved one.”

That he was more a creature of New York than of Hollywood may have had something to do with his Oscar night disappointments. For Mr. Lumet, location mattered deeply, and New York mattered most of all. He was the quintessential New York director.

“Locations are characters in my movies,” he wrote. “The city is capable of portraying the mood a scene requires.”

He explored New York early on in “The Pawnbroker” (1964), the story of a Holocaust survivor, played by Rod Steiger, numbed and hardened against humanity by the horrors he has endured, who deals with racketeers in his Harlem pawnshop until his conscience is reawakened by a vicious crime on his doorstep.

‘Serpico’

The city loomed large in Mr. Lumet’s several examinations of the criminal justice system. Police corruption particularly fascinated him, beginning with “Serpico” (1973). The film, based on a book by Peter Maas, was drawn from a real-life drama involving two New York City police officers, David Durk and Frank Serpico, who told David Burnham, a reporter for The New York Times, that they had ample evidence of police graft and corruption.

Publication of their story led to the mayoral appointment of a commission to investigate the charges and ultimately to major reforms. Both the book and the film concentrated on Detective Serpico, played by Al Pacino, and his efforts to change the system. Mr. Pacino’s performance brought him an Oscar nomination.

Mr. Lumet returned to the theme in 1981 with “Prince of the City,” for which he shared screenwriting credit with Jay Presson Allen. Based on the book by Robert Daley, the film dealt with an ambitious detective, portrayed by Treat Williams, who goes undercover to gather evidence for an investigative commission and who winds up alienated and alone after being manipulated into destroying the lives and careers of many of those around him.

Mr. Lumet focused on criminals, rather than the police, in “Dog Day Afternoon” (1975), telling the story (again, based on fact) of a botched attempt to rob a Brooklyn bank. Mr. Pacino again starred, this time as Sonny, the leader of an amateurish gang of bank robbers whose plans go awry and who winds up taking hostages and demanding jet transport to a foreign country. It turns out that Sonny, although he has a wife at home, had planned the robbery to pay for his boyfriend’s sex-change operation. In 2009, the film was added to the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress.

New York, or at least a fantasy version of it, was even the backdrop for Mr. Lumet’s most uncharacteristic film, “The Wiz,” his 1978 musical version of the “The Wizard of Oz” starring Michael Jackson and Diana Ross. Roundly panned, it was also a box-office failure.

By the time he finished shooting “Night Falls on Manhattan” in 1996, Mr. Lumet had made 38 films, 29 of them on location in New York City. That film, written by Mr. Lumet and based on another Daley novel, “Tainted Evidence,” once again looked at the justice system as it moved from a shootout with drug dealers into a revealing courtroom trial.

The courthouse was one of Mr. Lumet’s favorite arenas for drama, beginning with “12 Angry Men.” He returned to it again in “The Verdict” (1982), with a screenplay by David Mamet and a cast led by Paul Newman as a down-at-the-heels lawyer who redeems himself and his career when he represents a malpractice victim in a legal battle with a hospital.

But Mr. Lumet’s concerns could also range more broadly, to issues of national survival itself. One of the most sobering films of the cold war era was his 1964 adaptation of Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler’s novel, “Fail-Safe,” a taut examination of the threat of accidental nuclear war, with Henry Fonda as the president of the United States and a young Larry Hagman as his Russian-speaking interpreter. The film concluded with a harrowing suggestion of an atomic blast on American soil, rendered as a series of glimpses of ordinary life — children playing, pigeons taking wing — simply stopping. The scenes were from the streets of New York.

Sidney Lumet was born on June 25, 1924, in Philadelphia to Baruch Lumet and Eugenia Wermus, both actors in Yiddish theater. His father was born in Poland and moved his family to New York when Sidney was a baby and joined the Yiddish Art Theater. By the time he was 4, Sidney was appearing onstage with his father, and he went on to make his Broadway debut in 1935 as a street kid in Sidney Kingsley’s “Dead End.” He appeared in several more Broadway shows, including Maxwell Anderson’s “Journey to Jerusalem” in 1940, in which he played the young Jesus.

After wartime service as a radar technician in the Far East, Mr. Lumet returned to New York and started directing Off Broadway and in summer stock. His big break came in 1950, when he was hired by CBS and became a director on the television suspense series “Danger.” Other shows followed, including the history series “You Are There.”

His career soared in 1953, when he began directing original plays for dramatic series on CBS and NBC, including “Studio One,” “Playhouse 90” and “Kraft Television Theater,” eventually adding some 200 productions to his credits. He returned to the theater to direct Albert Camus’s “Caligula,” with Kenneth Haigh as the Roman emperor, and George Bernard Shaw’s “Man and Superman,” among other plays.

Among the highlights of Mr. Lumet’s television years were a full-length production of Eugene O’Neill’s play “The Iceman Cometh,” with Jason Robards as the salesman Hickey, and “12 Angry Men,” which he directed for television before turning it into his first film.

Some of Mr. Lumet’s early films had their origin in the theater. He directed Anna Magnani and Marlon Brando in “The Fugitive Kind” (1960), an adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s play “Orpheus Descending”; he traveled abroad to film part of Arthur Miller’s “View From the Bridge” (1962) in Paris, with Raf Vallone, Maureen Stapleton and Carol Lawrence, completing the film on the Brooklyn waterfront; and he returned to the world of O’Neill to film “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” (1962), with Katharine Hepburn and Ralph Richardson as the tormented Tyrones. His 1968 adaptation of Chekhov’s “Sea Gull,” however, was generally deemed uneven despite a stellar cast that included James Mason, Simone Signoret and Vanessa Redgrave.

A trainload of stars turned out for Mr. Lumet’s 1974 adaptation of Agatha Christie’s “Murder on the Orient Express,” a project that took him abroad again, this time to Britain, France and Turkey, to film the famous whodunit in which the detective Hercule Poirot (Albert Finney) must single out a murderer from a crowd of suspects that included Lauren Bacall, Ingrid Bergman, Sean Connery and John Gielgud.

There was a run of less-than-successful films, including “Running on Empty” (1988), with Judd Hirsch and Christine Lahti as ’60s radicals still in hiding from the F.B.I. 20 years after participating in a bombing; the police drama “Q & A” (1990), with a screenplay by Mr. Lumet, about a racist New York detective (played by Nick Nolte); and “Critical Care” (1997), a satiric jab at the American health care system.

Return to Television

In 1995, Mr. Lumet published a well-received memoir, “Making Movies,” in which he summed up his view of directorial style: “Good style, to me, is unseen style. It is style that is felt.”

He returned to television in 2001 as executive producer, principal director and one of the writers of a new courtroom drama for cable television, “100 Centre Street” (the title was the address of the Criminal Court Building in Lower Manhattan). The series, which ran for two seasons on A&E, had an ensemble cast, with Alan Arkin as an all-too-forgiving judge known as Let-’Em-Go Joe.

The director seemed immune to advancing age. Before long, he was behind the camera again. “Find Me Guilty” (2006), which starred Vin Diesel, was a freewheeling account of the events surrounding the federal prosecution of a notorious New Jersey crime family.

And he marked his 83rd year with the 2007 release of his last feature film, “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead,” the bleakly riveting story of two brothers (Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke) propelled by greed into a relentless cycle of mayhem. The film drew raves.

Mr. Lumet’s first three marriages — to the actress Rita Gam, Gloria Vanderbilt and Gail Jones, the daughter of Lena Horne — ended in divorce. He married Mary Gimbel in 1980. She survives him. Besides his stepdaughter, Ms. Gimbel, he is also survived by two daughters he had with Ms. Jones, Amy Lumet and Jenny Lumet, a screenwriter; a stepson, Bailey Gimbel; nine grandchildren and a great-grandson. Mr. Lumet also had a home in East Hampton, on Long Island.

Ms. Dargis called Mr. Lumet “one of the last of the great movie moralists” and “a leading purveyor of the social-issue movie.” Yet Mr. Lumet said he was never a crusader for social change. “I don’t think art changes anything,” he said in The Times interview. So why make movies? he was asked.

“I do it because I like it,” he replied, “and it’s a wonderful way to spend your life.”

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DR. BARUCH S. BLUMBERG, WHO DISCOVERED AND TACKLED HEPATITUS B

By H. ROGER SEGELKEN

Dr. Baruch S. Blumberg, the Nobel Prize-winning biochemist and medical anthropologist who discovered the hepatitis B virus, showed that it could cause liver cancer and then helped develop a powerful vaccine to fight it, saving millions of lives, died Tuesday in Moffett Field, Calif. He was 85 and lived in Philadelphia.

His family said he died, apparently of a heart attack, shortly after giving a keynote speech at a NASA conference at the Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, which is in the San Francisco Bay area. Dr. Blumberg had long been associated with a NASA project to hunt for micro-organisms in space.

Dr. Blumberg’s prize-winning virology and epidemiology work began in the 1960s at the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia and took him and his colleagues on field trips around the world, from Japan to Africa.

The work led to the discovery of the hepatitis B virus in 1967, the first test for hepatitis B in the blood supply and the development in 1969 of the hepatitis B vaccine — the first “cancer vaccine.” Dr. Irving Millman, a colleague at the research center, was its co-creator.

Dr. Blumberg’s discoveries have been compared to those of Jonas Salk, the developer of the polio vaccine. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1976 with D. Carleton Gajdusek for their work on the origins and spread of infectious viral diseases. (Dr. Gajdusek had discovered the cause of the kuru, or “trembling disease,” prevalent in New Guinea.)

Almost 20 years later, after decades of hepatitis B-related studies and a global search for medicinal plants to treat hepatic infections, Dr. Blumberg began what he called his second career. In 1999 he became the founding director of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Astrobiology Institute.

The institute’s mission was to oversee research teams in the development of life-detecting devices for planetary rovers and asteroid fly-bys, and to scrutinize life forms in “extreme” environments on Earth, like the ocean bottom and the geothermal cauldrons that produce geysers. He joined several expeditions himself.

To these seemingly disparate endeavors — investigating disease-causing organisms and postulating alien or primordial life forms — Dr. Blumberg contributed a broadened understanding of the evolutionary phenomenon called polymorphism, in which a species can adapt to an environment through changes in appearances and functions.

From his base in Philadelphia, Dr. Blumberg began investigating viruses with a study of yellow jaundice, so named because of the characteristic vivid yellowing of the eyes and skin. As early as 1940, medical researchers had determined that there were two different forms of virus-induced jaundice, one that is transmitted as an intestinal infection, and the other spread mainly by blood transfusions.

Scientific field trips to pinpoint the agent responsible for blood-borne jaundice were conducted by Dr. Blumberg and his colleagues in the Philippines, India, Japan, Canada, Scandinavia, Australia and Africa. Ultimately it was blood serum from an infected Australian aborigine that yielded the so-called Australian antigen, a protein found on the surface of the hepatitis B virus.

After he and Dr. Millman developed the hepatitis vaccine, they struggled to interest a pharmaceutical company to help develop and produce it.

“Vaccines are not an attractive product for pharmaceutical companies in that they are often used once or only a few times and they ordinarily do not generate as much income as a medication for a chronic disease that must be used for many years,” Dr. Blumberg wrote in an autobiographical essay for the Nobel committee.

Moreover, he said, the medical research community in the early 1970s remained skeptical about the claim that a virus had been identified and a vaccine developed.

Ultimately he and Dr. Millman signed an agreement with Merck & Company, whose vaccine laboratories were near Philadelphia.

Dr. Blumberg’s discoveries are credited with saving millions of patients from ever developing liver cancer. But in his scientific autobiography, “Hepatitis B: The Hunt for a Killer Virus” (Princeton University Press, 2002), he observed ruefully that hepatic disease was still killing 1.5 million people a year worldwide — despite the widespread availability of the vaccines he helped develop — and that 350 million were chronically infected.

Still, he was hopeful. “Life — and death — are full of surprises,” he wrote, “and while it may be tempting fate to be too optimistic, it appears likely that within the next few decades this virus will be effectively controlled.” (There is still no vaccine for the blood-borne hepatitis C, one of the five known hepatitis viruses.)

Dr. Blumberg’s traced his fascination with inherited variations in susceptibility to disease to the volunteer service he did during medical school at an isolated mining town in northern Surinam, where he delivered babies, performed clinical services and undertook the first malaria survey done in that region.

He was particularly interested in the sugar plantation workers who had been imported from several continents.

“Hindus from India, Javanese, Africans (including the Djukas, descendants of rebelled slaves who resided in autonomous kingdoms in the interior), Chinese, and a smattering of Jews descended from 17th century migrants to the country from Brazil, lived side by side,” Dr. Blumberg wrote in his Nobel essay. “Their responses to the many infectious agents in the environment were very different.”

He wrote his first scientific paper based on these studies and would revisit the tropics repeatedly. “Nature operates in bold and dramatic manner in the tropics,” he wrote.

By the late 1990s Dr. Blumberg was immersed in astrobiology, as NASA called the new science. Appointed by the NASA administrator, Dan Goldin, to lead the Astrobiology Institute, Dr. Blumberg and his team were asked to address three profound questions: How does life begin and evolve? Does life exist elsewhere in the universe? And what is life’s future on Earth and beyond?

As in his disease studies, Dr. Blumberg sought collaborations with specialists in a variety of fields, including physics, chemistry, geology, paleontology and oceanography as well as biology and medicine that would “help us to recognize biospheres that might be different from our own.”

While urging the development of instrumentation for astrobiological space probes, Dr. Blumberg recommended equal efforts in the study of earthly “extremophiles,” the organisms that somehow thrive in extreme temperatures, pressures and chemical conditions.

In fissures in the deep ocean floor, Dr. Blumberg said, are extremophiles that might resemble the earliest life forms on Earth or other planets. He described Earth as “a place of extremes” during the first few hundred million years of its 4.5-billion-year existence, given to radical climate fluctuations, from searing heat to immobilizing cold, amid constant meteorite bombardments and catastrophic volcanic eruptions.

He speculated that life might have started on Earth at geothermal sites, either underground or in the sea. The NASA venture — since diminished by administrative changes and financing cutbacks — was welcomed by those who advocate a search for extraterrestrial intelligence, known as SETI, and call the science “exobiology.” Dr. Blumberg joined the board of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif.

But in an interview with The New York Times in 2002, he said he would be “very surprised if we found something in space, that it would look like E.T.”

“If we found something more like a virus or a bacteria,” he said, “that would be astounding enough.”

Baruch Samuel Blumberg (Barry to his friends) was born in New York City on July 28, 1925, the second of three children of Meyer Blumberg, a lawyer, and Ida Blumberg. After attending the Yeshiva of Flatbush in Brooklyn, he went to Far Rockaway High School in Queens (whose graduates also include the Nobel physicists Richard Feynman and Burton Richter).

His undergraduate studies at Union College in Schenectady, N.Y., were interrupted by World War II, when he served as a Navy deck officer on landing ships. Returning to Union College, he completed a bachelor’s degree in physics, enrolled in graduate studies of mathematics at Columbia and transferred to Columbia’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, earning his M.D. there in 1951.

Dr. Blumberg served a clinical fellowship at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center, went to Oxford University’s Balliol College for a doctorate in biochemistry, and returned to the United States in 1957 to join the National Institutes of Health, where he headed the Geographic Medicine and Genetics Section until 1964.

Most of his research afterward was conducted at the Fox Chase Cancer Center. Dr. Blumberg was also on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania and its School of Medicine as a professor of medicine, medical genetics and medical anthropology.

Dr. Blumberg married Jean Liebesman, an artist, in 1954. She survives him, as do two daughters, Anne Blumberg of Boston and Jane Blumberg of Oxford, England; two sons, George, of Oxford, and Noah, of Chevy Chase, Md.; and nine grandchildren.

Dr. Blumberg saw his Nobel as more than an act of recognition. He said it helped draw renewed attention to his work with enormously beneficial consequences. After receiving the prize, he said, he was invited to China. “I spoke before several thousand people,” he told The Times in 2002. “I provided them with a copy of the patent, and now I’m told that it helped to change the direction of what they were doing and led to the saving of a lot of lives.”

Saving lives, he said, was the whole point of his career. “Well, it is something I always wanted to do,” he said. “This is what drew me to medicine. There is, in Jewish thought, this idea that if you save a single life, you save the whole world, and that affected me.”

Daniel E. Slotnik contributed reporting.

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WILLIAM H. PRUSOFF, WHO DEVELOPED AIDS DRUG

By WILLIAM GRIMES

Published: April 6, 2011

William H. Prusoff, a pharmacologist at the Yale School of Medicine who, with a colleague, developed an effective component in the first generation of drug cocktails used to treat AIDS, died on Sunday in New Haven. He was 90 and lived in Branford, Conn.

Dr. Prusoff spent most of his long career studying molecular derivatives of thymidine, a building block of DNA. His work led him to develop two important antiviral drugs.

In the early 1950s, he synthesized idoxuridine, a successful treatment for infant keratitis. The condition, an inflammation of the cornea caused by the herpes simplex virus, was the leading infectious cause of blindness. Idoxuridine disrupted the virus’s ability to reproduce.

This was an important breakthrough. At the time, it was believed that antiviral agents powerful enough to be effective would be too toxic for human use and that those safe for use would be too weak to counteract a virus.

Idoxuridine overturned medical dogma and, after winning approval by the Food and Drug Administration, became the first clinically used antiviral drug. For this reason, Dr. Prusoff is sometimes called the father of antiviral chemotherapy.

In the mid-1980s, as the AIDS epidemic spread, Dr. Prusoff and a Yale colleague, Tai-shun Lin, began looking at thymidine derivatives that had been developed to treat cancer but discarded when they proved ineffective. One of these was stavudine, also known as d4T, a molecular cousin of the first AIDS drug, AZT. Both had been synthesized in the 1960s by Dr. Jerome P. Horwitz at the Michigan Cancer Foundation, now the Karmanos Cancer Institute, in Detroit.

Dr. Prusoff and Dr. Lin resynthesized the molecule and found in laboratory tests that it short-circuited the viral enzyme in H.I.V., causing it to produce short, incomplete pieces of DNA rather than complete strands.

Yale took out a patent in the doctors’ names and licensed it to Bristol-Myers Squibb for development. In 1992, it became the first drug to be tested under the F.D.A.’s parallel-track policy, which allowed patients with life-threatening illnesses to obtain drugs undergoing clinical trials.

After F.D.A. approval, stavudine was brought to market in pill form in 1994 and sold under the brand name Zerit. It joined three other drugs, known as nucleoside analogs, approved for treating H.I.V.: zidovudine (AZT), didanosine (ddI) and zalcitabine (ddC). Eventually, these were joined by a new generation of drugs known as protease inhibitors.

Because of its potential side effects, notably numbness, burning sensations and loss of fat in the feet, legs or hands, the drug is now used primarily in poor countries, where it is cheap and widely available.

Stavudine earned tens of millions of dollars for Yale each year — more than the total amount for all its other licensed medicines combined. It also made millions for Dr. Prusoff, who became a vocal supporter of a campaign initiated by Doctors Without Borders to persuade Bristol-Meyers to lower the drug’s price in sub-Saharan Africa, where AIDS was rampant.

In March 2001, the company announced that it was reducing the price of the drug in Africa to 15 cents for a daily dose, from $2.23, and removing barriers to the sale of generic equivalents there.

“We weren’t doing this to make money,” Dr. Prusoff told the Yale School of Medicine Chronicle. “We were interested in developing a compound that would be a benefit to society.”

William Herman Prusoff, known as Bill, was born on June 25, 1920, in Brooklyn. His parents, Jewish immigrants from Russia, ran a small grocery.

He earned a degree in chemistry from the University of Miami in 1941. Rejected by the Army because of his poor vision, he spent World War II inspecting fuses at a munitions factory in Memphis and, as a health inspector, checking the water supply and the kitchens in Miami Beach hotels where pilots were billeted.

Urged by his parents, he applied to medical school, without success. He later enjoyed recalling that Yale deemed him so unqualified that it refunded his application fee in a gesture of pity.

Instead, he earned a doctorate in chemistry from Columbia in 1949 and then taught pharmacology in Cleveland at Western Reserve University (now Case Western Reserve) before joining the pharmacology department at Yale in 1953.

Dr. Prusoff used some of his patent money to create the William H. Prusoff Foundation, which supported numerous programs, including the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Anti-Semitism. He also endowed lectureships in virology and pharmacology at Yale and several scientific prizes.

In addition to his son, Alvin, of Fairfield, Conn., he is survived by a daughter, Laura, of Ortahisar, Turkey, and three grandchildren.

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DR. D.M. FRENCH, TREATED ’60S MARCHERS

By DENNIS HEVESI

Published: April 5, 2011

Dr. David M. French, who helped found an organization of doctors that provided medical care to marchers during the civil rights era and who later organized health care programs in 20 African nations, died on Thursday in Charlottesville, Va. He was 86 and lived in Barboursville, Va.