Volume 8

Born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pa., Fisher graduated from medical school at the University of Pittsburgh in 1943, and became a surgeon. Pitt Med School needed teachers, so Dr. Fisher signed on as the school’s first full-time member of the Department of Surgery. In 1953, he established the university’s first Laboratory of Surgical Research, the … Read more

An artist, Fitzgerald worked in the entertainment industry, in a very specific niche: title design. Also known as “the credits,” there are the “main” (or beginning) titles, and the end titles — and Fitzgerald was the go-to master for many directors, including Francis Ford Coppola, John Huston, Mike Nichols, Robert Redford, Arthur Penn, Michael Cimino, … Read more

Born in China’s Henan province, Wang chose to follow her mother into medicine. After earning her medical degree she went into research, specializing in hepatitis. In the late 1980s, China became concerned about hepatitis — a “foreign” disease — contaminating their blood supply, so rather than continue to import blood the government set up their … Read more

Though Keenan’s British parents had settled in New York before he was born, his mother traveled to England to give birth to him, and then brought him home to Brooklyn. In 1941, after high school, he joined the New York Police Dept., but his career was interrupted by World War II: Keenan was in both … Read more

After earning a Master’s degree in English, in 1974 Lee took a job at a still new independent newspaper feature syndication agency, the Universal Press Syndicate, as its editor. UPS had started with a fast-growing comic, Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury — and one of the first things Salem did with that was submit it for the 1975 Pulitzer … Read more

Born and raised in Texas, Leavelle joined the U.S. Navy when he graduated high school in 1939. He was a sailor on the destroyer USS Whitney …and it was stationed at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Leavelle was aboard the ship, which was among a flotilla of five other destroyers in the harbor, but none of them were … Read more

A writer, Siegel was first published at 18 — but his career was interrupted by World War II; he fought with the 10th Mountain Division, and earned a Purple Heart, a Bronze Star, and several other decorations. After the war, Siegel enrolled at the University of Illinois, wrote for Shaft, the school’s humor magazine, and was promoted … Read more

Born and raised in Israel, Cohen was in high school when he read an article in the newspaper about “electronic brains” — computers. “The idea of having a machine that acts like a brain was very fascinating,” he said years later, “and that got me interested in the area.” First, though, he had to get … Read more

Born in Moscow, Kardashev was an astrophysicist. After receiving his PhD in 1962, Kardashev pretty quickly gravitated to his field of interest: the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. In 1964, he published the paper “Transmission of Information by Extraterrestrial Civilizations”, which proposed a way to measure an alien civilization’s level of technological advancement based on how … Read more

“You can’t have ‘Lights, camera, action!’ without ‘lights’,” Hymes said in an interview: he was a TV lighting director with the NBC network starting in 1951, working where he was needed: Today, Sing Along With Mitch, Your Hit Parade, To Tell the Truth, and many more. In later years, he worked on Late Night — with Conan O’Brien, then … Read more