James Watson has died
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
[1] https://www.cshlpress.com/default.tpl?cart=17625586661954464...
Edit: Watson is also personally responsible for convincing one of the most unethical and conniving scientists I know to go into science rather than medicine, so I have additional reasons to be suspicious, given assholes propagate assholes. If you're a Crick, for God's sake, stop taking pity, and don't tolerate Watsons even if you feel bad for them or they treat you in particular very well, have some standards and be a Stoner.
Someone publicly known?
Who are you referring to in this?
I love Making, and I'm currently on a Nick Lane/biology bender. Eigth Day is new to me. On my way to the e-book store of my persuasion ...
Will check this out and see how it measures up to my favorite book on the topic, The Gene: An Intimate History [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gene:_An_Intimate_History
He spoke at an event hosted by my company, once. He was pissed at Alec Baldwin, and devoted some time to calling him names. We were all looking at each other, going “WTF?”. He was supposed to be talking about using our microscopes, which never came up. It was a lot more like listening to Grandpa complaining about “kids these days,” after getting into the schnapps.
Have a friend that retired from CSH, a few years ago. Watson was a familiar presence, there; even after his Fall From Grace, which came about 20 years late. He used to live like a prince, on campus. Not sure if he was still there, before he went into hospice.
Most folks had a lot of difficulty with him, but he was a money magnet. They put up with his stuff, because he was such a good fundraiser.
It’s amazing how forgiving we can be, when money is to be made.
Oh? Care to reveal your stake in the success of the book?
I've always wanted to see how the structure maps to x-ray diffraction pattern in Photograph 51. Pretty neat!
Especially when the accomplishment is built on basically stolen/unacknowledged work. I’d rather have more Rosalynd Franklin in the world than more James Watson.
Ask yourself why we talk so much about Franklin and so little about Gosling. Perhaps the world is, in fact, NOT as discriminatory against women as you think.
(There is also plenty of evidence that Franklin could be quite unpleasant. If that tarnishes Watson, then it certainly also tarnishes her. What is good for the gander is good for the goose.)
If we accepted peoples’ completely biased views of what makes a human “good”, that’s how I’d respond. But we don’t, which is why that would be a ridiculous response - just as ridiculous as pretending that being a meanie-head makes you a “bad person”.
We as a society should prioritize valourzing the non-assholes who do great things over the assholes who do great things.
The less assholes you have to deal with in your day to day affairs the better off you are.
If the goal of the collective action is to cancel anyone who (like Watson did) asserts that one race of people is on average less intelligence than another race, then say so.
I'm not trying to criticize those people or imply anything about them. But in my experience a lot of assholes kind of fly under the radar because they're not in the public eye and no one speaks up.
I personally know LOTS of brilliant people in the bay area tech scene who are not assholes, and are wonderful kind people, so if you only know assholes, you're hanging out with and licking the boots of the wrong people, and that's your problem, and you should re-think who your friends and heros are.
And I flagged your comment for accusing me of licking boots. You don't even know me. Do better.
I wonder if conflating assholery with talent or accomplishment is particularly common in bay-area start up culture.
Just seemed like a fun thought experiment.
People save other people's lives all the time. We hear about it and also would hear about people dying in the attempt and yet.. Don't hear much about it.
Such childish playground logic exuberantly deployed in the pursuit of defending an unrepentant flaming racist asshole.
Do you always get so triggered when people call out racists that you're compelled to reflexively leap to their defense for some reason?
"I know you are but what am I" was funny when Pee-Wee Herman said it ironically and comedically, but not when you do.
SAT + GPA are proxies for "IQ stuff" and are highly predictive of future academic success:
https://international.collegeboard.org/toolkit/sat-policy/un...
Second nobody said the SATs don't measure something, but that something is ability to take an SAT test which is highly predictive of how well you can take other tests. Which as our society puts lots of stock into tests isn't nothing but it's not measuring anything inate.
He seemed to have been basing the comments on IQ tests, which are not really a good way of comparing groups of people with different cultures or education. They score an individual within a group of comparable individuals.
It is worth noting that if he had made the same statement in the first half of the 20th century it would have been mainstream science, but even then it was not so much supported by evidence but supported by a lack of evidence showing otherwise.
That is a very misleading statement. Height differences within sexes are also greater than between sexes, and yet most men are taller than most women.
It should be noted that Watson knew this hence why he was focused on the one thing you can say very definitely about black people in America, that they have darker skin then white people and thus was trying to tie melanin to to intelegence.
Jim Watson was, from my view, emotionally stuck in the fourties. Even if it was true, you wouldn't tell a female grad student to their face that they belong in the kitchen. Yet he did say that (less than 15 years ago) to one of my former colleagues.
For me, I work usally with the assumption: "Even if there existed small differences IQ between races explained by genetics, it never tells you something about the individual before you."
Would you say this is a valid belief?
"Even if there was small differences in honesty caused by being a Spaniard, it never tells you something about the individual before you."
When there is no actual evidence of Spaniards being dishonest and the only people making the argument seem to already have a beef with the people of Spain.
However, in the end there was a 18 point IQ difference, at age 17, between the adopted white children (105.5) and the adopted black children (83.7). Half white/black children fell almost exactly in between (93.2). The study also had some interesting accidental (?) control variables in that some children had been racially misclassified, but their IQs ended up aligning with their race rather than their identity.
Of course one can still argue that this is environmental, by appealing to e.g. prenatal or social biases and the like, but I think there is no evidence based argument that there is no difference between races, even when every effort is made to eliminate as many viable environmental factors as possible. Obviously the mean doesn't define the individual. There are plenty of high IQ black individuals, and plenty of low IQ white individuals. But group differences are nonetheless very real.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Transracial_Adoption...
It is kind of like the oddness of British prime ministers kneeling to the king and such, but a US anarchronism.
Which is what we see here - people trying to put some sort of scientific veneer to their racism. I don't even know where to start - they seem to think you can boil a brain down to a number and then rank them, in addition to some hand wavy notion that this has nothing to do with education but is 100% genetics (whatever this magical "IQ" number is which boils the billions of neurons in a human brain to one magic number). It is obvious from the outside,from outside the US, but permeates a sheltered, de facto segregated US in the throes of attacking DEI and making America great again like the days of Jim Crow (or even slavery). Obvious to most non-Americans but kind of invisible to upper middle class white Americans who grew up in de facto segregated suburbs.
Leaving aside the question of what IQ actually measures, the authors of the single study you cite interpret the results as inconclusive due to confounding factors. The mainstream position in biology is that race is not a biological concept [1]. It seems that you are trying to argue that there is some immutable difference between races, a position usually described as scientific racism. As you are not aware of evidence-based arguments against scientific racism, there are studies showing a reduction of the "Racial IQ Gap" [2], as well as papers reviewing scientific racism in the literature [3] where it is argued that much contemporary research promoting ideas of immutable racial differences fail to meet evidentiary and ethical standards.
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11291859/ [2] http://www.iapsych.com/iqmr/fe/LinkedDocuments/dickens2006a.... [3] https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Famp0001228
The authors of the study itself say that it "provide[s] little or no conclusive evidence for genetic influences underlying racial differences in intelligence and achievement."
> "The test performance of the Black/Black adoptees [in the study] was not different from that of ordinary Black children reared by their own families in the same area of the country. My colleagues and I reported the data accurately and as fully as possible, and then tried to make the results palatable to environmentally committed colleagues. In retrospect, this was a mistake. The results of the transracial adoption study can be used to support either a genetic difference hypothesis or an environmental difference one (because the children have visible African ancestry). We should have been agnostic on the conclusions."
---
It gets back to the main issue here. You can't expect an open and good faith discussion on this topic when any one can suffer major career and other consequences for not adopting the politically correct view. And indeed extremely compelling evidence to the contrary of such is immediately met with a mixture of logically flawed arguments (e.g. - various groups have suffered tremendous discrimination with no apparent impact on IQ or later achievement, Jews being the obvious example) and ad hominem.
The study results are obviously not what the author's expected to find, which left them in a very difficult place. I think that is also why this was the last effort to try to experimentally prove that genetics don't matter. This is also likely why they continue to insist that the almost exactly ~20% of the mixed race individuals were misclassified by accident. Had they shown an environmentally favorable argument, I suspect it would have been revealed as a rather cleverly concocted control group. As is, it's extremely difficult to explain this (the mixed race individuals believed they were black and appeared as such, yet tested in accordance with their genetics) with a typical environmental argument.
Every single parent wants the best for their kids and would do anything for this. We, socially, already spend an obscene amount of money on education and other factors meaning government support to try to turn this viability into a reality would be through the roof - including in endless support on promising research along these lines. And keep in mind this isn't only for black families - there's a significant IQ deficit between whites and East Asians as well, for instance.
But where are these exciting studies on the verge of revolutionizing society? They do not exist. It's kind of like cold fusion. The latest science and research on this topic doesn't really matter. People want to find it and have been searching for decades with promising leads that go nowhere. But if one day they do, you'll know, because it will be something that would have dramatic implications for all of humanity.
Here you said:
> If it helps, you can think of my opposition to the notion that blacks are somehow intellectually inferior to whites as religious, and you might just as productively spend your time trying to convert me to Zoroastrianism.
Someone even mentioned that this was falsifiable:
> His admission really is incredibly revealing, and refreshingly, even depressingly honest. He's literally saying no amount of reason or evidence could change his mind on a matter that is obviously (in principle) falsifiable. I think it's safe to say that, so far as full contact with reality is concerned, he is a lost cause.
Anyways, I am just interested if you have changed your mind, and you are now treating this as falsifiable or if it is impossible to convince you with any evidence. I think this is useful information for anyone debating you in good faith.
In addition to being rude, it isn't even logically coherent. What I do or do not thing about racial supremacy has nothing to do with the very answerable question about whether behavior and molecular genetics research regarding intelligence is being published.
Btw, I just remembered that comment from reading that thread recently. I obviously didnt pour through 10 years of one HN’s most prolific posters.
Either work on behavioral genetics (including behavioral genetics through the lens of racial groups) is being produced by serious scientific groups or it isn't. It is, as you can trivially verify. Ergo, the claim I made in the post I responded to is falsified. What you think about me doesn't enter into it.
So too it goes with the things I said about the MTAS: it does in fact have a small sample, it does in fact have issues with controls (look where they got the adoptees from), it does predate a large amount of scientific work on inherited environment, gene/environment interaction, and epigenetics.
Even a hereditarian wouldn't make the claim the parent commenter made, that MTAS is the last word on this question.
In fact, given the falsity of claim the parent commenter made on this kind of work being suppressed, it would be weird if it was the last word on the question: scientists have spent 20 years drilling into this, and the result has, among other things, been the "Missing Heritability Problem". You don't even have to know anything specific about MTAS to get the problem with the claim on this thread.
Even if there is a connection between skin colour and IQ (which there is not, as far as I know) you'd still need to judge people on their individual merit. It's all about "on average, black people have a lower IQ". Even if true, you can't do anything meaningful with that in any liberal merit-based democracy. White people from rural Alabama might also score lower on IQ tests than white people from NYC. When pressed, even the racist assholes posting in this thread will admit that James Mickens is way smarter than the average white programming/computer scientist (never mind funnier). He certainly is smarter than me and I'm white enough to get sunburns in Ireland.
I would say the entire focus on connection between race and IQ is almost entirely prejudice because it just doesn't matter. Barring than the occasional well-intentioned misguided soul, if you dig in to all the people focused on it then it rarely takes long to find some genuinely racist things well beyond their so-called "just looking at the objective facts".
I guess those so rabidly claiming that people are no allowed to study connection between race and "intelligence" are too dense to see their own biases and axioms.
Franklin's experimental data wasn't the only key experimental data, but it was pivotal.
Franklin could have elucidated the structure of DNA herself, but she was working on other problems.
Watson and Crick were head's deep in the problem and were building stick figure models of all the atoms and bonds. They synthesized the collection of experimental measurements they had to correct and confirm their model.
At the time, scientists already suspected a corkscrew structure but there was disagreement between what that looked like or whether it was double or triple helixed.
Franklin's key experiments resulted in the Photograph 51 that almost single-handedly proved the structure. Before Franklin could publish her data, Wilkins—without the consent or knowledge of Franklin—took that photo and showed Watson. Watson later stated that his mouth dropped when he saw the photo. It proved to him the double helix structure and that guided the rest of their modeling/work. At that point they knew what they were proving. Two months later they'd advanced their model far enough and rushed to publication before Franklin could be credited with her own work
Not only did they use Franklin's work without her consent, not only did they not credit her, but they even belittled her in their books and talks. They even referred to her as "Rosy", a name she never used herself.
> she didn't realize its significance or implication.
That does not change the fact that they plagiarized and cheated. They could have collaborated with her and/or credited her
The man just died and it's as if you're trying to pry the Nobel Prize from him.
Franklin didn't know what she had. If she did, she would have been working on it.
In a moment of supreme clarity, the universe revealed itself. Watson and Crick knew immediately the photo would cut down their search space from alternative structures. They still had work to do, because the Angstrom length data is not a model by itself. It just constrained the geometry for the bonds and electrochemistry.
Wilkins was "second-in-command" to Randall, developed the DNA structure project, and convinced Randall to assign more people to work on it. Randall then hired Franklin, reassigned Gosling, the graduate student who had been working with Wilkins, to Franklin, and told Franklin that Wilkins would simply be handing over his data to her and that she would subsequently have full ownership of the project. Randall didn't tell Wilkins any of this of course, so a lot of hard feelings developed between Franklin and him. The situation got worse when Wilkins tried to get sample from external collaborators to continue working on the project himself and Randall forced him to hand over one of the samples to Franklin. Franklin finally got sick of Randall herself and left, leaving Randall to turn over all the data to Wilkins, who then went to talk about his pet research interest with Crick, a personal friend of his. Wilkins then recused himself from Crick's paper, feeling he hadn't contributed enough to it. He also worried publicly to others that maybe he had been unkind and driven Franklin out, having minimal insight into Randall's tactics, which are unfortunately common in the field. When they're being used on you by someone skilled in them, it's often hard to realize, and you end up being resentful of the person you're being pitted against until one of you leaves and you suddenly have clarity because the stress of the situation is suddenly reduced.
When men have had their scientific advances plagiarised, stolen, claimed from them in the same quantity as non-men, sure, but that's like saying "you're complaining that I stole a million pounds but they stole a can of coke!" Nonsense whataboutism.
(Bonus points if you know even 3 of those without looking them up)
Marion Donovan appears to have invented a "diaper cover" among other things, her patent then being ignored by several companies. Unfortunate, but I've never heard of whoever supposedly stole credit for that ground-breaking invention either, so it hardly seems relevant. I'd hope in the age of Ali Express and Temu that I don't need to point out how often men's patents get ignored.
I had heard of Nettie Stevens. Her work was not stolen, she published after Edmund Beecher Wilson.
Vera Rubin presented the very controversial theory of dark matter. Given that she worked closely with a male collaborator, Kent Ford, who co-authored many of her papers, it seems more likely that their work was overlooked due to initial resistance to the theory itself.
Lise Meitner was a Jew in Nazi Germany.
Alice Ball's work seems to have been stolen after she died in isolation in a leprosy colony. I'd never heard of Arthur Dean either.
I'll stop there as this will take forever otherwise. What you have listed seem to be extremely tenuous as evidence of gender bias - one can quite easily hop on Google and find plenty of examples of stolen inventions, from automatic windscreen wipers to Facebook.
If anything though I think the real problem is actually being inverted. At the time when women began pushing or being pushed into industry and academia, why did we value industry and academia over what the women were doing at the time? Caring for children seems pretty important, and outsourcing that to under-resourced strangers and in many cases foreigners as we do today is quite odd when you think about it.
> During a symposium held for centenarian Albert Hofmann, Hofmann said Mullis had told him that LSD had "helped him develop the polymerase chain reaction that helps amplify specific DNA sequences".
What should be the outcome or even content of such debate? They existed; they were great and terrible; they are dead. Given the usual inability of mankind to deal with nuance, some will hate them and some will worship them.
In general, it can be expected that people who really shift the scientific status quo will score low on agreeableness. It usually means trampling on someone else's theories and results.
We are not talking about disagreeableness that causes someone to pursue an unconventional path to discovery. We are talking about cheating, pure and simple. I hope you are not claiming that science rests on such behavior.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Kekulé#Kekulé's_dream
The closest thing is Franklin's Photograph 51 which took about 100 hours to compile and then took another year to do all the calculations to confirm the position of each atom.
Watson and Crick (without the consent of Franklin) saw this Photograph, did some quick analysis, and came up with a couple of models that could match Franklin's photograph. Watson and Crick were already at work trying to crack the model of DNA, but once they got access to Franklin's work, it became the entire basis of their modeling. After about 2 months of this they finally found the double helix structure that matched Franklin's findings.
I doubt Crick was on LSD for an entire 2 months. Perhaps he was tripping when he first viewed the photograph?
In any case, while Franklin certainly didn't get along with Watson, she was close friends with Crick and his wife Odile up to her death and in fact lived with the Cricks when she was undergoing treatment for her cancer [2]. This would be hard to square with the idea that she thought Crick had "stolen" "her" data,
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Gosling [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Mad_Pursuit
As for why Franklin and Watson didn't get along, you can get some idea from Watson's own writings -- Watson liked to talk and joke around and Franklin wasn't interested in that sort of thing, at least not during work hours.
But we are not talking their later work. The issue under discussion is their DNA structure work, and for that Watson wa the main one in their collaboration.
> Watson liked to talk and joke around ...
This euphemistically dances around the issue.
Psychedelic proponents like to claim that LSD helped Francis Crick discover the double helix, but every time I go looking for a source it's a circular web of references and articles that cite each other or, at best, claim that Crick mentioned to a friend that LSD helped him.
I need to re-read his book
Edit: wrote "Wilkinson" by msitake.
The main idea is that primates such as humans and chimps lost the ability to synthesize vitamin C eons ago, and as a result evolved excellent color vision for finding fruits and in some cases hunting other animals. Pauling supplemented his diet assiduously with Vitamin C and lived to be 93 years old.
Watson has now beaten this record. Maybe it was the Vitamin C, but maybe it was the casual racism and objectivation of female coworkers and subordinates... Who knows?
Linus Pauling was also famously in favor of eugenics directed at African Americans, proposing things like compulsory sickle cell anemia testing for African Americans and forehead tattoos for carriers of the sickle cell gene. So maybe not a surprise that James Watson would vibe with Linus Pauling's legacy.
I would still take that over being an unaccomplished nobody getting sidetracked with baseless medical quackery.
Society tends to transfer skills/talent/achievement/luck in one field and assume those attributes hold good in all fields because they were successful in one area, even if there is no justification, so their beliefs tend to carry lot more weight and influence than the average joe and hold the field back.
Talented people when sidetracked may no longer be as effective contributors, for example Einstein's dogmatic beliefs in aspects of quantum mechanics or similar other topics likely partially contributed to his diminished contributions in later part of his life.
Ideally the best case is balance between being courageous to hold any kind of belief strongly even if its not conventional wisdom, but also at the same be willing to change in the face of strong evidence.
>diminished contributions in later part of his life
Whew, that's a wild one.
I would have thought of all examples this would be less controversial, it had nothing to do with politics or ideology or religion, it was an entirely technical belief, he felt chasing.
In an alternative reality he may have switched to another area of study after hitting dead ends with unified theory with better results.
It is not for us to say or expect what luminaries do, it is privilege for us they do share anything at all, but it is not also true we do lose a bit when such brilliant minds do get sidetracked ?
There's also the extremely important EPR paper from 1935, twenty years before his death. He certainly didn't stop producing useful science just because he felt it was a good idea to explore ideas that didn't work out.
What is truly embarrassing is stuff like this:
I kept away from political examples as it inevitably gets contentious[1]
I was just trying to highlight the challenge that talented would have on one hand have strong faith in their intuition at the same time be able to change their mind when presented with overwhelming evidence.
[1] still got downvoted smh
Einstein was merely talking about looking after your people. Carl Sagan as well. The government is there to ensure the system is running healthy and enables its citizen to thrive and prosper. But instead we have a system that is extractive and funnels resources and power to the top.
Einstein was basically warning about what is happening now. We are the richest country in the world yet we let ppl die or starve if they don’t have money.
Our system does not follow capitalism the way it was defined. It’s been totally corrupted by the Epstein class and if people don’t push back against this corruption then we are straight to a future as depicted in Elyisium.
"Einstein concludes that these problems can only be corrected with a planned economy where the means of production are owned by society itself"
"Nevertheless, it is necessary to remember that a planned economy is not yet socialism. A planned economy as such may be accompanied by the complete enslavement of the individual. The achievement of socialism requires the solution of some extremely difficult socio-political problems: how is it possible, in view of the far-reaching centralization of political and economic power, to prevent bureaucracy from becoming all-powerful and overweening? How can the rights of the individual be protected and therewith a democratic counterweight to the power of bureaucracy be assured?"
Dor Yeshorim is Hebrew for "upright generation" (a reference to a Psalm), and I always thought that was a pretty eugenics-y sounding name. Of course attempting to influence which people have children with which other people in order to avoid genetic problems is a type of eugenics, just one that seems reasonable in light of the fact that it does seem to have greatly reduced the prevalence of Tay-Sachs sufferers.
They also don't get it tattoed on their forehead against their will.
It's a trait that some people of Irish descent, like Watson, share.
See also: self-deprecating humor Greek, Jewish, Italian, and members of other ethnicities are sometimes known for. The difference is that Watson just didn't care to read the room before letting loose.
How could it possibly be self-deprecating if he was specifically shitting on "Irish women"?
I have a feeling this must be the other way around. The ancient primates had a diet high in fruits, which is why they could survive without harm when the gene for synthesizing vitamin C mutated into a non-functional form. They must have had the colour vision for detecting ripe fruits before that.
Hopefully some molecular clock based research will iron out which one came first.
Oh my goodness, that's terrible. What racist things did Watson say about the Fighting Irish?
And by today's standards, I mean those applied to everyday scientists, not the "important" ones that should not be disturbed.
A terrible person indeed.
"We are much indebted to Dr. Jerry Donohue for constant advice and criticism, especially on interatomic distances. We have also been stimulated by a knowledge of the general nature of the unpublished experimental results and ideas of Dr. M. H. F. Wilkins, Dr. R. E. Franklin and their co-workers at King’s College, London."
[1] https://dosequis.colorado.edu/Courses/MethodsLogic/papers/Wa...
[2] https://www.sciencenews.org/article/rosalind-franklin-dna-st...
I am a man who did his PhD in the 2000's. If my supervisor took my data and went on publishing them under his name, not only would I have kicked him in the ass publicly, but I would make my personal vendetta to crap his academic life.
She was a woman (with a not-so-nice character), in the 50s, so this would not have flown, obviously.
Let's not pretend he was not a crappy person in the name of a virgin academic world.
Setting your bizarre ranting aside, you appear to have misread - Franklin was the supervisor. It was her PhD student Raymond Gosling who took Photo 51:
As for "bizarre ranting" - I guess you have never had anything you did credited to somebody else. Good for you (seriously), but in that case please do not comment about the emotions of others.
If you did and think this is fine - well we live in different worlds then.
Well, froth away. Watson and Crick discovered the structure of DNA and appropriately credited Dr. R. E. Franklin (not "Rosy") in their paper.
It does not matter that she was a woman - should they have stolen from a man (which here is also the case) they would have been thieves as well.
Do not put completely useless gender craziness in this. We are talking about one scientist using dirty methods to hide another scientist.
This is in addition to his stolen work of course.
The fact that he dies does not, fortunately, clear his name.
From just recently:
> James Watson, Co-Discoverer of the Structure of DNA, Is Dead at 97
> ‘90s rapper dead at 51: ‘He went out in style’
> Anthony Jackson, Master of the Electric Bass, Is Dead at 73
> Chen Ning Yang, Nobel-Winning Physicist, Is Dead at 103
> Ace Frehley, a Founding Member of Kiss, Is Dead at 74
> Ruth A. Lawrence, Doctor Who Championed Breastfeeding, Is Dead at 101
> Soo Catwoman, ‘the Female Face of Punk,’ Is Dead at 70
More famous headlines:
> Jimmy Carter, Peacemaking President Amid Crises, Is Dead at 100 [1]
> Nancy Reagan, Former First Lady, Is Dead At Age 94 [2]
> Dick Cheney Is Dead at 84 [3]
> Ozzy Osbourne Is Dead At 76 Years Old, Just Weeks After The Final Black Sabbath Concert [4]
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/29/us/politics/jimmy-carter-...
[2] https://www.scrippsnews.com/obituaries/nancy-reagan-former-f...
"Abraham Lincoln, president of the United States, dead at 56"
It's meant for headline brevity, replacing things like "has died at age 97" and is standard practice.
Claude Achille Debussy, Died, 1918.
Christophe Willebald Gluck, Died, 1787.
Carl Maria von Weber, Not at all well, 1825. Died, 1826.
Giacomo Meyerbeer, Still alive, 1863. Not still alive, 1864.
Modeste Mussorgsky, 1880, going to parties. No fun anymore, 1881.
Johan Nepomuk Hummel, Chatting away nineteen to the dozen with his mates down the pub every evening, 1836. 1837, nothing.
-- Michael PalinSeriously though: RIP to an incredible contributor to both Science & future of humanity.