Lester Reed: A “complex” man who loved science

Lester Reed: A "complex" man who loved science.

Lester J. Reed, a pioneer in the field of biochemistry, died peacefully in Austin, Texas on January 14, 2015 at the age of 90. Lester Reed was born in New Orleans on January 3, 1925. He showed an early interest in chemistry, having his own laboratory in a shed under his boyhood home. He received his Bachelors of Science from Tulane in 1943, where he worked with William Shive, and earned his doc...

S. Jonathan Singer: A man who loved ideas and detested walls.

S. Jonathan Singer, “Jon” to one and all, died February 2, 2017, at the age of 92. Educated as a physical chemist, he transitioned gracefully by way of protein and immunochemistry to become a cell and molecular biologist of huge renown. His initial bout with fame came in 1949 when Jon was a postdoctoral fellow with Linus Pauling at the California Institute of Technology and, together with Harve...

The Chatbot Who Loved Me

The paper describes the BotCom complex embedded conversational agent system, which is accessible over the Internet and capable of high quality natural language processing as well as sophisticated manipulation of emotions. It relies on an extension of Plutchik’s emotional model. Experimental cases leading to useful constraints for optimization are discussed. BotCom, a prototype for a robust comm...

A man who borrowed cars.

robbery when his wife came to the neurology department at our hospital, in May, 1997, to ask for advice. At the age of 33, her husband had had a subarachnoid haemorrhage due to a ruptured aneurysm of the anterior communicating artery, and had undergone surgery a few days later. Up to then, he had no medical or psychiatric history, and had never been in trouble. He was married, had a daughter, a...

Who Is This Man?