Obituaries

The purinergic signalling and the broader scientific and medical communities lost a pioneer of purinergic research within Australia and abroad. Jim was both an outstanding scientist and clinician, still active in these roles until his passing, symbolising his great commitment to and energy and enthusiasm for high-quality science from the bench to bedside. In his final days, he was reading research articles, and discussing with his former student, mentee and long-term collaborator, Dr. Ben J. Gu, their project relating to P2X receptors and early-stage apoptotic platelets. Jim was deeply admired, respected, and liked by his students, staff, peers, and patients, being commonly described as a “gentleman”. Jim is remembered by his wife Karin, children Malcolm and Kirsten, and six grandchildren.

James Saville Wiley was born in Sydney on the 9^th of June 1936. His father was a doctor and had served in the Royal Australian Army Medical Corps during World War 1. From 1956 to 1964, Jim served in the Australian Army Reserve rising to the rank of Lieutenant. In 1958, Jim was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship for both his academic and athletic prowess (as a schoolboy he had won state championships in the 880 yard and mile events and in 1956 he trialled for the Melbourne Olympics). Jim undertook a BSc at the University of Oxford (1959–1962). Following his return to Australia, he obtained an MBBS (1965) and an MD (1973) from the University of Sydney. He continued his medical training as a junior resident medical officer (1966–1967) and fellow in haematology (1967–1968) at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, Sydney. Jim held several medical and research positions throughout his long and prosperous career including positions at the Hammersmith Hospital, London (1971), and University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (1971–1975), the place at which he would later develop a life-long passion for purinergic signalling. Jim was devoted to the care of patients with haematological disorders and was a fellow of both the Royal Australian College of Physicians and Royal College of Pathologists Australia.

Read the full obituary here.

When Elliott Levitas became Georgia's first Jewish congressman in 1975, he was already known for being a public servant who had stood up against racism in the formerly segregated state. And he continued his call to aiding others years afterward, helping to lead a landmark class-action lawsuit on behalf of American Indians against the U.S. government.

The legal and political crusader against injustice died Friday, Dec. 16, just 10 days before his 92nd birthday.

Levitas would serve five terms in the Legislature and became a leading proponent for the development of Atlanta's rapid transit system, MARTA.

In 1974, he was elected to represent Georgia's Fourth Congressional District. Levitas headed the subcommittee investigating the Reagan administration's efforts to undermine the mission of the Environmental Protection Agency, which led to the firing of dozens of senior officials.

His environmental efforts as a legislator and U.S. representative also were reflected in his work to create and fund the Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area as a national park. Many years later in 2011, the U.S. National Park Service honored Levitas at a ceremony at the Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area.

For most of his childhood, David grew up in Washington, D.C., until his family moved to Provo in 1951. He served as a missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from 1957-1959 in the East German Mission. David received degrees from Brigham Young, Oxford University where he was a Rhodes Scholar, and the University of California at Berkeley. He practiced law in California, Utah, and Washington, D.C., and served two terms as the Attorney General of Utah (1981-1989). David met Tricia Thomas in the summer of 1976, and they married in the Salt Lake Temple in December. They were foster parents to two teenagers and subsequently had four children, whom they raised in Utah and Northern Virginia.

His family will remember him most for his curiosity and love of learning, his gift of conversation, and his witty sense of humor. He loved researching family history, reading the newspaper, ice cream, tennis, and BYU football. His children describe him as a wonderful father who supported them in their varied interests.

A tribute from Rhodes Scholar RW Johnson (Natal & Magdalen 1964). 

"I first heard of Charles Simkins at Oxford. I was friendly with the two Politics tutors at Balliol College, Steven Lukes and Bill Weinstein and often used to lunch with them there. Thanks to its stellar reputation in PPE (Politics, Philosophy and Economics), Balliol always attracted a record number of often wonderful PPE applicants. (The phrase most associated with Balliol has always been “effortless superiority”.)

Sometimes at lunch Bill and Steven would mention a particularly outstanding student. I remember them mentioning Charles Simkins in that regard. Like my own college, Magdalen, Balliol attracted many Rhodes Scholars and Charles had arrived on that ticket, having graduated from Wits where he’d also served on the SRC.

Like another Balliol South African, Martin Legassick, Charles had initially started as a physicist but had then been captivated by the social sciences. I use that phrase deliberately because Charles was a true PPE man, fascinated by all three subjects. He could as easily have been a sociologist, a philosopher or a political scientist as the economist he became. He was, too, no slouch as a demographer.

I only got to know Charles later and was immediately struck by the subtlety and complexity of his intelligence. In analysing any subject he would juggle a large number of factors which were very different in kind, showing the same sort of subtle appreciation as would have been employed by specialists in any one of half a dozen disciplines. In my experience people with such minds are rare birds indeed.

I had known academics at Oxbridge, Harvard and Stanford who were clearly Charles’s intellectual inferior and I was struck by the fact that Charles had not ventured into those pastures, as he undoubtedly could have. Instead, he never seems to have hesitated about returning to South Africa where he spent his life struggling for the liberal cause against the tide.

Under apartheid Charles’s work for black trade unions earned him a banning order and restriction to a small geographic area but he never spoke of this or laid claim to any role in the struggle. He was a quiet, modest and very gentle man, entirely without personal political ambition. It was something of a surprise to learn that he was a High Church Anglican and I suspect that, like many South African liberals, he was influenced by the missionary tradition and saw opposition to apartheid as a moral imperative rather than a political act.

Charles passed through Oxford in early 1995 and dined with me in Magdalen. I told him I was thinking of coming back out to South Africa to re-found the Helen Suzman Foundation. He encouraged me but warned me that I would face an ideologically hostile climate – “The ANC and the Nats both hate liberals. You may not last long.” This was indeed the truth and I often thought of that conversation in the six years that followed.

Having taught in a number of South African universities, Charles ended up as the Helen Suzman professor of economics at Wits. But in the New South Africa the English-speaking universities had become tricky ground.

Charles’s department included a non-South African black lecturer who neglected his teaching so that Charles frequently had to step in to fill the gaps with extra lectures. This man then put in for promotion. Charles understandably turned this down but was then accused of racism by the angry lecturer.

The vice-chancellor then summoned Charles, prejudged the case by threatening Charles with dire reprisals – and then set up an enquiry. The enquiry found that Charles, though not a racist, had “missed opportunities for transformation”. As so often in such cases, the incident was a huge cause of nervous strain for Charles and permanently cast a shadow over him in the eyes of many students. It was an absurd inversion of justice.

I talked to Charles not long after this. He told me he had responded by ensuring that he taught only technical economics at Wits, avoiding all exploration of any wider issues. In this way he could avoid all mention of anything that might be deemed political or, worse still, “controversial”.

Instead, he worked on the real debates, controversies and interesting questions purely for off-campus organizations like the SAIRR, the Helen Suzman Foundation and other NGOs. This meant, of course, that Wits had become a complete negation of what a university ought to be. “On every corridor there is someone acting as an ideological commissar”, Charles said.

For this reason Charles soon resigned from Wits in order to teach at St Augustine’s (Roman Catholic) college. That a leading scholar should give up a prestigious chair at Wits for a post at a much smaller and less prestigious college speaks volumes. The point was that at St Augustine’s there was still academic freedom. Happily, Charles was then able to devote himself to his research post at the Helen Suzman Foundation, which he found highly congenial.

For the last decade of his life Charles devoted himself to the care of his seriously ill wife, Rae. He was a completely unselfish man and never complained. Then, in the last year, he became seriously ill himself, emerging from the ICU only in time to see Rae die. In his last few weeks he was prone to hallucinations. Once he told a friend that he had just been enjoying “a wonderful conversation with Bill Johnson”.

I wish that had indeed been the case but even so, I treasure the thought and the story. Charles not only had a magnificent intellect. He was a lovely man with almost all the virtues and, as far as I could see, none of the vices at all. While I live, I shall miss him."

Carey Parker, who helped shape and shepherd to passage some of the most significant federal laws of the past 50 years as the chief legislative aide to Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), becoming an eminence of Capitol Hill in his own right, died Dec. 4 at a rehabilitation center in McLean, Va. He was 88.

Mr. Parker was 34 years old, a Rhodes scholar with a Harvard law degree, when he joined Kennedy’s office in 1969. Scarcely six months earlier, the senator’s brother Robert, a U.S. senator from New York then seeking the 1968 Democratic nomination for president, had been fatally shot in California.

Following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas in 1963, Robert’s death left Ted the only surviving Kennedy son and, as a senator still in his first full term, the heir to his family’s political legacy.

Over the next four decades, through tragedy and controversy, Ted Kennedy emerged as one of the most consequential senators of his era. He oversaw a large office of staffers who shared his commitment to civil rights, social justice and other central tenets of liberalism. But by all accounts, no aide did more behind the scenes than Mr. Parker to translate Kennedy’s ideals into legislation, or to support him as he assumed his mantle as the “lion of the Senate.”

“He was my father’s alter ego,” Patrick J. Kennedy, Ted Kennedy’s youngest child and a former Democratic congressman from Rhode Island, said of Mr. Parker in an interview, recalling how the senator relied on Mr. Parker’s “brilliance” to “advance their common cause.”

Mr. Parker was hired as a legislative assistant but soon took on responsibilities far outstripping the title. In his recently published biography “Ted Kennedy: A Life,” author John A. Farrell described Mr. Parker as “something of a Senate legend” and one of Kennedy’s “matchless assets.”

On matters of legislation, he “had the first word with the senator and the last word with the senator,” Jeff Blattner, who served as chief counsel to Kennedy on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in an interview.

Like Kennedy, Mr. Parker was a skilled negotiator, ever attuned to the needs and ambitions of colleagues on both sides of the political aisle. Also like Kennedy, he had a capacious mind for the intricacies of policy on matters ranging from voting rights to health care to tax policy to apartheid in South Africa and peace in Northern Ireland.

The senator devoted years to health care and social services. Working closely with Mr. Parker, he helped pass laws, including the 1990 Americans With Disabilities Act, the 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act, the 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (often called HIPAA), the 1997 law that created what is now the Children’s Health Insurance Program (widely known as CHIP), and the Affordable Care Act, which President Barack Obama signed in 2010, a year after Kennedy died.

“America,” he declared, “is a better and freer nation than Robert Bork thinks.”

Bork’s nomination was ultimately rejected by the Senate in one of the most divisive battles over a judicial nomination to that point. “It certainly served its purpose,” Mr. Parker said of the speech in a 2008 oral history with the Miller Center at the University of Virginia.

In 1994, during the Clinton administration, Mr. Parker helped shepherd through the Senate confirmation of Justice Stephen G. Breyer, who had served as chief counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee when Kennedy was chairman.

Mr. Parker was a key adviser to Kennedy during the 1980 presidential election, in which Kennedy challenged incumbent President Jimmy Carter for the Democratic nomination. Kennedy’s bid was unsuccessful, but it gave him the platform for one of the most memorable speeches of his career, his address at the Democratic National Convention in New York. Kennedy speechwriter Bob Shrum drafted the remarks but credited Mr. Parker with refining them.

In the speech, Kennedy congratulated Carter on his victory and said that “for me, a few hours ago, this campaign came to an end.”

But “for all those whose cares have been our concern,” he declared, “the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.”

William Carey Parker II was born in Philadelphia on Oct. 3, 1934. His father was a physician, and his mother was a church volunteer.

He grew up in Bryn Mawr, Pa., and was a 1952 graduate of the private Haverford School in Haverford, Pa. He received a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from Princeton University in 1956, studied as a Rhodes scholar at Trinity College at the University of Oxford, and received a PhD in the sciences from what is now Rockefeller University in New York in 1963.

Inspired by Kennedy’s 1960 inaugural address, in which he called on Americans to “ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country,” Mr. Parker pursued a career in public service.

He received a bachelor of laws degree from Harvard University in 1965, clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart and served as a special assistant in the Justice Department’s criminal division before joining Ted Kennedy’s staff. During their early years together, they played a key role in lowering the voting age to 18 from 21, a goal achieved with the ratification in 1971 of the 26th Amendment.

Kennedy so valued Mr. Parker’s service that, in an unusual arrangement, he used his personal wealth and money from his political action fund to supplement Mr. Parker’s Senate salary. Mr. Parker served the senator until Kennedy’s death from brain cancer, and remained on the office staff under Paul G. Kirk Jr., who held the Senate seat until Republican Scott Brown’s victory in a 2010 special election.

Mr. Parker was a longtime resident of the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington. His wife of 57 years, the former Betsy Libby, died in January. Survivors include two daughters, Annie Parker Dalgleish of Vienna, Va., and Catherine Parker of Seattle; a brother; and five grandchildren.

Mr. Parker cared little for the dinners and cocktail parties where congressional hobnobbers often gather. He worked through lunch every day, dining at his desk on an egg salad sandwich purchased from the Senate cafeteria.

He did, however, confess to enjoying the Kennedy office holiday parties, in which the snowy-haired senator would sometimes dress up as Santa Claus. One year, Kennedy went as Barney, the purple Tyrannosaurus rex of the children’s television show, in a self-deprecating nod to jabs at him as an aging “dinosaur” of Capitol Hill. Another year, Kennedy, the “lion of the Senate,” donned a costume from “The Lion King.”

Mr. Parker, ever content to let the senator shine, wore his normal attire. “I was just standing in the background,” he said.

On December 4, 2022 John Beckett passed away suddenly at his home. Dearly beloved husband of Ann. Loved father and father-in-law of Peter and Caroline (United Kingdom), Michael, Georgina and David Sisam. Adored Grandpa of Harry, Charlotte, Jessica, and Olivia, and devoted canine companion of Tilly.

Robert Allan Rosenfeld was born in Columbus, Ohio to George and Eleanor (Kahn) Rosenfeld on September 11,1949. He died on November 15, 2022 of pancreatic cancer which had been diagnosed in March, 2017. Until that time, Bob was one of the foremost antitrust lawyers in San Francisco, practicing for most of his career at Heller, Ehrman, White & McAuliffe, until its dissolution in 2008, at which time he moved to Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe. Bob was the consummate professional: brilliant, ethical, supportive, practical and focused. Despite his many intellectual and professional accomplishments, he remained an unpretentious, friendly, positive Midwesterner.

Bob went to Wiley High School in Terre Haute, Indiana where his family moved soon after his birth. He was a champion debater in high school. When it came time to go to college, he chose George Washington University in Washington D.C, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1971. Bob maintained a strong connection to George Washington, serving on its Board of Trustees from 1991 to 1993 and the Law School Dean's Advisory Council from 1999 to 2002.

Capitalizing on his success at George Washington, Bob was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship in 1971, the first GWU student to be so honored, and studied at Corpus Christi College of Oxford University from 1971-1973. He graduated with a Master of Arts and returned to the United States to attend Harvard Law School, where he was Managing Editor of the Harvard Law Review and graduated cum laude in 1976.

That summer, he worked at Heller Ehrman, before beginning a clerkship for the Honorable Marvin Frankel of the Federal District Court for the Southern District of New York. After a year with Judge Frankel, Bob moved back to Washington, D.C to clerk for the Honorable Warren G. Burger, Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court. When his clerkship finished, Bob moved to San Francisco permanently, beginning his career at Heller Ehrman in 1978. He became a shareholder of the firm in 1983.

While at Heller, Bob worked on a variety of matters for some of the firm's most important clients – Bank of America, Delta Dental, Seattle First National Bank, Pacific Gas & Electric, and Texas Instruments. He also worked on a number of pro bono cases. Beginning in 1999, and continuing through his cancer diagnosis in 2017, Bob represented Microsoft Corporation in a variety of consumer antitrust class actions throughout the country filed in the wake of the ruling in United States v. Microsoft, in private antitrust cases brought by Microsoft competitors and in investigations and lawsuits against Microsoft in the European Union, Canada and Korea. In these engagements, he headed a large team of lawyers and experts, developed and implemented complicated litigation strategies, argued motions in federal and state courts throughout the country and negotiated complex settlements. During those years, Bob developed deep and abiding relationships with Microsoft's in-house counsel and his co-counsel, many of whom remained close friends long after the cases had been resolved. In fact, Bob was one of the few high-powered lawyers who made friends with opposing counsel as well, always finding some way to connect even with equally fierce opponents.

In addition to his active practice at Heller, Bob was chair of the firm from 1993-1999, a period of significant growth, during which the firm opened offices in Singapore, Washington, D.C and New York City. Throughout his tenure, the firm's footprint and profits increased but it continued to operate largely by consensus. Much of the collegial feeling at Heller was reflected by Bob's personality and his management style. Bob always cared about the individual success of the people around him – his partners, associates, co-counsel and clients. As a firm leader and as an advocate, Bob always kept his eye on the long game and never lost sight of where he wanted to go and how he was going to get others there with him.

By September 2008, the economic forces affecting the country signaled the downfall of Heller and, after 116 years, the firm closed its doors. During that very difficult time, Bob negotiated a new home for the antitrust practice at Heller, moving lawyers from the New York, Washington, D.C, Seattle, London and San Francisco offices to Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe. He chaired the Antitrust and Competition practice at Orrick from 2008 until 2016. Between 2008 and 2017, Bob continued to represent Microsoft, Delta Dental and other clients who moved with him from Heller to Orrick.

Bob was especially interested in the health care system and was on the Board of the California Pacific Medical Center from 2005 to 2009 and on the West Bay Regional Hospitals and Medical Foundation Board from 2009 to 2015, where he was Vice Chair from 2012 to 2015.

At the end of 2018, Bob's doctors organized his treatment so that he could go to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to spend a year as a Fellow in the Advanced Leadership Initiative (ALI) at Harvard University. Bob quickly became the intellectual linchpin of the ALI fellowship, noted among his peers for his disputatiousness, his intelligence, and his humility. He audited classes on religion, democracy, education policy, and the American presidency, among others, and was a charismatic presence in those classes, a Pied Piper to the undergraduates and a support to the professors, who often turned to him during lectures for explanations of legal and constitutional issues. He loved the intellectual life of Cambridge and extended his stay, enrolling as a Senior Fellow for a second year at ALI, though that year was quickly interrupted by COVID. Even away from Cambridge, Bob joined ALI friends in many sustained interactions, including a group that worked to develop a program for strengthening American democracy, a group of Senior Fellows, and a small book group that met twice a week for discussions of a wide range of topics, including racism, American poetry, antitrust law, the Chinese economy, and the Supreme Court.

Bob was a voracious reader (and a voracious book buyer) of both fiction and non-fiction and a stickler for grammar. Some of the most contentious discussions he had with colleagues concerned the proper use of commas and introductory phrases that he could not abide, something he called "left-leaning sentences." Bob loved international travel, and could find a bookstore and a hamburger anywhere in the world. During the 1980's, with his partner Wey Lundquist, Bob was part of a small committee established by the American Bar Association to foster dialogue with lawyers in the Soviet Union. Between 1983 and 1986, Bob hosted Soviet lawyers in San Francisco and went to Moscow for meetings there. He helped organize a human rights seminar in the Soviet Union in 1987 and in 1989, organized an internship program that placed 17 Soviet lawyers in law firms throughout the United States. On Bob's return to the office, his stories always included late night sessions with his Soviet counterparts, fueled by good conversation and even better vodka.

Bob is survived by his wife, Anne Wertheim Rosenfeld and his son, Matthew. He also leaves his sister, Nancy Friedberg.

Verdel Amos Kolve died peacefully at home and without pain on November 5, 2022 from complications of kidney cancer. Larry Luchtel, his husband and companion of fifty years, was at his side. Born in rural Wisconsin, he graduated Summa cum laude from the University of Wisconsin in 1955, and subsequently attended Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, earning an Honors B.A. in English Literature with a Congratulatory First in 1957, and an M.A. and D. Phil. from Oxford while serving as a tutor and Research Fellow at St. Edmund Hall, Oxon., between 1958 and 1962. In that year he accepted an assistant professorship at Stanford University, rising there to the rank of associate professor in 1968, before moving to the University of Virginia as Commonwealth Professor of English in 1969. In 1986 he joined the faculty of the University of California at Los Angeles, becoming the first UCLA Foundation Professor, and teaching there for fifteen years before retiring in 2001.

An internationally renowned scholar of medieval literature, with a particular interest in Chaucer, Kolve was a member of Phi Beta Kappa, a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America, serving as its President in 1992-1993, an Honorary Fellow of St. Edmund Hall, and Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was President of the New Chaucer Society for two years, in 1994-1996. In addition to many scholarly articles, he published four books: The Play Called Corpus Christi (1966), Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative: The First Five Canterbury Tales (1984, winner of the Phi Beta Kappa Prize, for “the Best Book Published by a Faculty Member in the Academic Year 1984-1985,” the British Council Prize in the Humanities, for “the Best Book by a North American Scholar on Any Aspect of British Studies in the Humanities,” and the James Russell Lowell Prize of the Modern Language Association, for “the Outstanding Scholarly Book by a Member of the Association Published in 1984”), Telling Images: Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative II (2009, winner of the Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award, for “An Outstanding Book of Literary Scholarship or Criticism”), and with Glending Olson, an edition for teaching, Nine Canterbury Tales and the General Prologue (1989), subsequently reprinted several times.

Recognized as well as a brilliant and inspiring teacher at both undergraduate and advanced levels, Kolve opened the aesthetic triumphs of the Middle Ages to generations of students. His eloquence, learning, and close attention to all in every class were many times acknowledged  (Outstanding Teacher Award of the Graduate English Faculty Club, University of Virginia, 1971; E. Harris Harbison National Teaching Award, Danforth Foundation, 1972; Luckman Distinguished Teaching Award with Special Distinction in Graduate Teaching, UCLA 1995), but in his view never better than by the lasting respect and affection of his students. In their successes he found great joy.

A. Kolve was much loved, and returned that love widely, but not without discrimination. His absence will be felt deeply by many for years to come..