Obituaries - Nov. 15, 1999
Thomas Jukes; Molecular Biologist
Thomas Hughes Jukes, 93, a noted molecular biologist and nutritionist who was emeritus research biochemist and former professor-in-residence at UC Berkeley. Not afraid to wade into controversial issues, Jukes fought against the teaching of creationism in schools and, despite his Sierra Club membership, against the banning of DDT. Born in Hastings, England, Jukes immigrated to Canada in 1924 at the age of 18. After receiving his doctorate in biochemistry from the University of Toronto in 1933, he moved to California, where he had been drawn by the writings of Bret Harte and Mark Twain. In 1942, he moved to New York to take a job at Lederle Laboratories, a division of American Cyanamid Co., where he evolved the idea of giving antibiotics to animals so they could be raised in greater concentrations. In 1963, he moved on to UC Berkeley as a research biochemist. In the early 1970s, Jukes argued against the ban on DDT, noting that the pesticide had saved the lives of countless people in Third World countries as a cheap but effective way to kill malarial mosquitoes. He also spoke out against creationists who wanted to remove discussion of evolution from school textbooks and, in the 1980s, was instrumental in getting numerous California textbooks rejected because of their inadequate discussion of evolution. “He hated humbuggery . . . and should be remembered as a crusader,” said Kevin Padian, a UC Berkeley professor of integrative biology. For many years, Jukes wrote a column on evolution for the British journal Nature. On Nov. 1 at Alta Bates Medical Center in Berkeley of pneumonia.
Robert Kramer; Avant-Garde Director
Robert Kramer, 60, an American film director who devoted his career to capturing dissident movements from Vietnam War protesters to Latin American guerrillas. Kramer made more than two dozen films and numerous smaller documentaries and television pieces. His work was avant-garde and experimental and generally better received in Europe than in the U.S. Two of his better known works, “Doc’s Kingdom” and “Route One USA,” were reflections on the exile’s life that he had after moving to France in 1980. Born in New York in 1939, the son of a doctor, Kramer studied philosophy and Western European history at Swarthmore College and Stanford University. He was among the generation of leftist intellectuals who espoused social justice. His films did not always clearly differentiate between fiction and documentary, but often contained a sense of man’s evolution in the changing world. In 1969, he and two colleagues traveled to North Vietnam to film “People’s War.” In 1975, he and another colleague filmed “Milestone,” which centered on the aspirations of people of the left in the 1970s. On Wednesday at a hospital in Normandy of meningitis.
Hank Messick; Lansky Biographer
Hank Messick, 77, reporter and author on organized crime best known for his biography of mobster Meyer Lansky. A native of Happy Valley, N.C., Henry Hicks Messick earned degrees at the universities of North Carolina and Iowa and taught English briefly at what now is Colorado State University. He worked as a reporter for several North Carolina newspapers, the Louisville (Ky.) Courier-Journal, the Miami Herald and the Miami Beach Sun. His beat was crime, particularly organized crime, and in 1967 he published his first book, “The Silent Syndicate.” He followed with 18 other books, but his greatest success came in 1971 with “Lansky.” Most of his 19 books involved organized crime’s infiltration into certain geographical or commercial areas, including the Bahamas, drugs, gambling and show business. He also examined the history of particular crimes, such as kidnapping, and the role of key government officials in dealing with crime, including Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover. “Perhaps no single individual,” commented the Library Journal, “has more fully documented the sordid, irrepressible growth of organized crime in this country than Messick.” A 1978 profile in the popular press said: “Hank Messick’s mind is like a geodetic survey of American crime. . . . The names of hoods and goons and crooked cops and alleged international vice lords roll off his tongue like strange poetry.” Messick, a Southerner, wrote one book outside his usual genre--”King’s Mountain: The Epic of the Blue Ridge Mountain Men in the American Revolution,” published during the nation’s bicentennial in 1976. On Nov. 6 in Cocoa, Fla. of Sjogren’s syndrome, an incurable autoimmune disorder.
