Milestones

By Harriet Barovick, Tam Gray, Lina Lofaro, David Spitz, Flora Tartakovsky and Chris Taylor

DIED. GARSON KANIN, 86, playwright and director whose Born Yesterday (1946 on stage, 1950 in film) is considered a comedy classic; in New York. With his wife, the actress Ruth Gordon, Kanin wrote the scripts for several of the more celebrated movie pairings of Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, including Adam's Rib (1949) and Pat and Mike (1952). He also claimed some credit for his brother Michael's screenplay for Woman of the Year (1942).

DIED. YEHUDI MENUHIN, 82, icon of 20th century music and world-renowned humanitarian; of heart failure; in Berlin. A few years after stunning a San Francisco audience at his first major concert at age 7, the prodigy went on to play at Carnegie Hall, where colleagues had to tune his violin for him because his fingers were too small. A New York-born Jew who lived in London, Menuhin was endlessly open-minded--he loved the Beatles and jammed with Ravi Shankar--and was consumed with using his music to promote world peace. Of his 75-year career, which included establishing schools for young musicians, playing for World War II soldiers and associating with individual Germans during the war (which enraged many Jewish groups), he said, "I am convinced that music can bring men closer together."

DIED. SIDNEY GOTTLIEB, 80, eccentric chemist who ran some of the CIA's most shadowy operations, including the agency's infamous mind-control experiments of the 1950s and '60s; in Washington, Va. Gottlieb once said the paucity of U.S. knowledge on the effect of drugs "posed a threat of the magnitude of national survival" to explain the existence of MK-Ultra, a program that mandated dosing unsuspecting citizens with LSD.

DIED. PHILIP STRAX, 90, impassioned radiologist who ran free clinics for women and championed early detection of breast cancer; in Bethesda, Md. Stricken by the loss of his first wife to the disease, Strax helped lead a landmark 62,000-woman-strong study in the 1960s that found mammography could reduce fatalities by a third.