Walter Meyerhof, 84; Atomic Physicist Taught at Stanford

Walter Meyerhof, 84, a prominent atomic physicist who taught at Stanford University for 43 years, died May 27 in a Los Altos, Calif., nursing home of complications from Parkinson’s disease, according to his wife, Miriam.

She said her husband’s passion for science began as a child in Kiel, Germany, after his father, Otto Meyerhof, a 1922 Nobel Prize winner for medicine, gave him a microscope.

After escaping Nazi-occupied France with the help of Varian Fry, an American who also helped more than a thousand others to safety, Meyerhof came to the U.S. in 1940.

He later co-founded a foundation devoted to educating young people about Fry’s work and wrote about his flight from Europe in his 2002 memoir, “In the Shadow of Love: Stories From My Life.”

In the 1970s, he served as head of Stanford’s physics department and wrote two textbooks, including “Elements of Nuclear Physics,” an introductory work still in use.