Milestones

DIED

NO ONE HAD HEARD of LCD television in the late 1960s, when Nobel-prizewinning French physicist Pierre-Billes de Gennes began studying liquid crystals, a form with properties of both liquids and solids, now used to create bright, clear displays for TVs and other devices. On awarding the 1991 Nobel to De Gennes, the jury called him the "Isaac Newton of our time." He was 74 and died of unknown causes.

WHERE DID LIFE BEGIN? AS rich as that question has been for scientists, at least one fact is not in dispute. While a graduate student at the University of Chicago, Stanley Miller masterminded the most famous experiment in the field. By fashioning a semblance of a young earth, oceans and all, Miller discovered that amino acids--key building blocks of life--could be generated from the chemicals presumed to have been present on the earliest earth. The experiment, results of which were published in 1953, helped launch the scientific study of the origin of life. He was 77.

AFTER BEING RESCUED IN 1993 from a 13-day ordeal during which he was held by kidnappers in a pit under a New York City highway, clothing executive Harvey Weinstein awed his family and colleagues by simply going on with his life. But the story of the Marine vet's survival in the face of the nightmare--he recited his life story to stay sane--won him national acclaim. One of the worst moments, according to Weinstein? Finding out that one of his captors was an employee. He was 82.

HIS FATHER, raising a son in the Great Depression, urged him to pursue banking. Instead, Lloyd Alexander, enchanted by Greek mythology, Charles Dickens and world politics, wrote mythic, brooding tales for kids--most famously the 1960s five-book series The Chronicles of Prydain. Of the evil sorcerers his protagonist fights to recover a stolen magical sword--enemies that bear a resemblance to actual oppressive political regimes--the two-time National Book Award winner said, "At heart, the issues raised in a work of fantasy are those we face in real life." He was 83.

LONG BEFORE IT WAS COOL TO decry junk food, culinary historian Karen Hess bluntly assessed the state of U.S. cuisine, skewering such sacred cows as Julia Child and James Beard. "Our palates have been ravaged, our food is awful," she wrote in the 1977 book, The Taste of America. "Our most respected authorities ... are poseurs." In later works, Hess pioneered the academic study of food, insisting on primary sources and illuminating Colonial cooking habits in books like Martha Washington's Booke of Cookery, which had remained in the former First Lady's family for generations and was annotated by Hess. She was 88.

AT 18, HE WAS THE YOUNGEST licensed pilot in the U.S. A few years later, brash aviator Robert Buck was a national hero. Dubbed the Schoolboy Pilot--he drank milk in flight and called his parents after every landing--Buck flew a 28-hour 1930 trip from Newark, N.J., to Los Angeles, setting the junior transcontinental speed record, and made a record round trip to Havana in 13 hours. A chief pilot for TWA, where he worked from 1937 to 1974, Buck wrote such acclaimed books as North Star Over My Shoulder, a must- read for new pilots. He was 93.

CHARGED

WHEN POISONED ex--KGB spy turned Kremlin critic Alexander Litvinenko, inset above, lay dying in a London hospital last year, he famously pointed the finger at Vladimir Putin, calling the Russian President "barbaric and ruthless." Now British prosecutors have challenged Russia by requesting the extradition of ex--KGB bodyguard Andrei Lugovoi in the murder--a request Russia promptly refused. Lugovoi, who denies any guilt, met with Litvinenko at a London hotel the day his tea was poisoned with the radioactive substance polonium-210.

CLEARED

SHE HAS PLAYED MANY roles in Hollywood, but Elizabeth Taylor's latest drama played out in a U.S. court of appeals, which ruled that the actress, an avid art collector, could keep a Vincent van Gogh painting. In 2004 a family sued Taylor, claiming that View of the Asylum and Chapel at Saint-Remy had been confiscated by the Nazis from their ancestor, who fled Germany in 1939. Taylor insisted the work had passed through two Jewish art dealers without any sign of coercion before she paid $257,000 for it at a 1963 Sotheby's auction.

With reporting by Camille Agon, Harriet Barovick, David Bjerklie, SCOTT BROWN, Elisabeth Salemme