No subject

librarian for 2GB, co-ordinating thousands of records, and then program
manager. His tireless work ethic was rewarded and responsibilities were
increasingly delegated to the new young exec. Then came the war.


Campbell enlisted for active service and was posted to New Guinea and
surrounding islands for five years. He was with the 157 Light
Anti-Aircraft Battery stationed on Horne Island.

In 1944, with the enemy on the run, most of the boys were going home. The
writer learnt from one of Campbell's old Army mates just a day before
Campbell's funeral that Campbell had decided not to return home. A
lieutenant was looking for volunteers for a mission in New Guinea. Twelve
men were taken and all had to be unmarried. Only three returned. Campbell
never spoke of this, or the war. He would quietly leave the room if Combat
was on TV. But he came home carrying a bayonet wound, pieces of shrapnel
from a hand grenade, and malaria.


After a lengthy stint in Concord Repatriation Hospital, Campbell was fit
enough to take up his former life at 2GB. He became the manager and best
mate of Jack Davey, who was rapidly becoming the greatest radio
personality ever seen in this country; the stories that emanated from that
relationship are too numerous to mention. He also struck contracts with
quiz masters Bob and Dolly Dyer, entertainers Bobby Limb and Dawn Lake,
and race caller Ken Howard, and was producing live radio shows in the
Macquarie auditorium with these home-grown celebrities. He was also
involved in bringing to Australia stars such as Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis
jnr, Nat King Cole, and Laurel and Hardy. 


Campbell also hired and nurtured the early careers of John Laws, Brian
Henderson, John Tapp, Ray Warren and many others.

Campbell was appointed 2GB station manager and then manager of the
Macquarie Broadcasting Network. He was also president of the Federation of
Australian Radio Broadcasters.

He lived in and loved Manly, being a president and life member of the
Manly Civic Club, for which he worked tirelessly.

In his younger days he was an A-grade tennis player, skippered a 12-metre
yacht and, being an accomplished equestrian, won blue ribbons in
showjumping at the Royal Easter Show. In those days it would have been the
equivalent of a national title.


Campbell married Sylvia Eastwood in 1964 and became stepfather to her sons
Alan and John. He missed her enormously after her death in 1994. The
advent of grandchildren - Rebecca, Elizabeth, Ben and Jarrod - brought him
great happiness and they will miss him greatly.

No-one ever heard Campbell use a profane word. He was never critical or
judgmental of anyone. He had great inner strength, honesty and integrity.
He left behind a legacy to the radio industry that was the result of years
of dedication.

He was one of those rare and fortunate individuals who loved what he did
for a living and never tired of it.

Alan Eastwood 

Viktor Hamburger

Embryologist
1900-2001

He mapped much of the delicate pas de deux executed by the developing
nervous system and the tissue it controls. Viktor Hamburger, an
experimental embryologist, has died in St Louis at the age of 100.

Hamburger, who spent much of his career as a professor at Washington
University, was born soon after embryology had grown into an experimental
science from a mainly observational pursuit.

His death comes as much of classical experimental embryology, which
focuses on tissues and cells, is being supplanted by strategies that look
at the interactions of molecules in the embryo. 

"It is given to relatively few to be so totally identified with a
scientific endeavour," said Dr Maxwell Cowan, then vice-president and
chief scientific officer at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, in his
introduction to Studies in Developmental Neurobiology: Essays in Honor of
Viktor Hamburger (Oxford University Press, 1981). 

As a leading experimental embryologist throughout the field's heyday,
Hamburger discovered some of the basic principles that govern development
across many species.

He tried to call attention to the unanswered questions of classical
embryology so that younger scientists could use the power of molecular
biology to go where he could not. 

Hamburger and his colleagues figured out that the architecture of the
nervous system depends as much on which nerve cells die as it does on
which cells are born, and they determined many of the rules for predicting
the cellular winners and losers. 

Scientists already knew about the one-way chemical and electrical traffic
from a nerve cell to a muscle or other target tissue, but Hamburger's
laboratory determined that the traffic was two-way. That fundamental
finding spun off a new area of research that attracted many scientists. 

The first trophic factor, a protein called nerve growth factor, or NGF,
was discovered in Hamburger's laboratory. He collaborated on the biology
of the factor with Dr Rita Levi-Montalcini; a biochemist, Dr Stanley
Cohen, joined the project to isolate the protein, which was done in 1954. 

Hamburger moved on to the study of the origin of behaviour in the early
1960s.

He found that chicken embryos moved in predictable ways as they developed,
until they finally broke out of their shells, and that those movements
were spontaneous. That discovery contradicted the contentions of
behavioural psychologists, who said all behaviour arose from stimuli or
reflexes. 

But Hamburger's detour from the nerve growth factor work may have been a
costly decision. Though he was a member of the National Academy of
Sciences and received many honours, he probably drew the most attention
from his peers for an award he did not receive: the 1986 Nobel Prize in
physiology or medicine, which was awarded to his colleague Levi-Montalcini
for the NGF work, and to Cohen for his later work on epidermal growth
factor.

"Viktor's contributions were to set the stage to make that discovery
possible," said Dr Thomas Woolsey, a neurobiology professor at Washington
University Medical School. 

Hamburger was born in Landeshut, Germany, now part of Poland, and became
interested in biology as a child. He earned his PhD in 1925 under the
experimental embryologist Dr Hans Spemann at the University of Freiburg in
Germany.

He was working in Spemann's laboratory in 1921 when an experiment, now
considered a classic, discovered the principle of the embryonic
"organiser".

In 1933, the Nazis came to power and Hamburger was told that he no longer
had a research position because of his Jewish ancestry. In 1935 he moved
to Washington University in St Louis.

Hamburger is survived by two daughters. His wife, Martha, died in 1965. 

Karen Freeman The New York Times


Dennis Puleston

Campaigner against DDT
1905?-2001

He loved birds. He liked watching them, or painting vivid watercolours of
them. Almost single-handedly he saved the osprey, the bald eagle and the
peregrine falcon. 

Dennis Puleston, a boat builder, adventurer, author and artist
instrumental in winning a ban on the pesticide dichloro diphenyl
trichlorethane (DDT) in many countries, has died at his home in
Brookhaven, New York. He was 95. 

Puleston became an environmentalist in 1966 after observing a decline in
the hatchings of the osprey on New York's Long Island, where he lived.
Spraying of DDT to abate mosquitoes, he determined, so weakened the shells
of the osprey eggs that the chicks inside died. Alarmed, he joined friends
in suing the Suffolk County Mosquito Control Commission to halt the
spraying. It was Puleston's watercolour artistry in seven canvases,
depicting the food chain from plankton to blue-claw crabs to large birds,
that convinced a local judge that DDT must be banned. 

Puleston formed the Environmental Defence Fund in 1967 and served as
chairman until 1972. Now called Environmental Defence, it has 300,000
members.

Born in Leigh-on-Sea in Britain, Puleston studied naval architecture and
biology at London University and then in 1931 went to sea with a friend in
a 10-metre yawl for a six-year odyssey. Settling in New York, where he
married Betty Wellington, Puleston became a US citizen in 1942 and started
working with naval architects to design the amphibious craft nicknamed the
Duck that was used in the Normandy landing. He spent the war years
training Allied forces to use the craft. He was wounded by a Japanese
shell splinter when teaching British troops in Burma. 

President Truman awarded Puleston the Medal of Freedom in 1948 for his
work on the Duck. 

That same year, Puleston joined the Brookhaven National Laboratory, where
he worked until his retirement in 1970. 

In 1992 he published a book, A Nature Journal: A Naturalist's Year on Long
Island, illustrated by 155 of his watercolours. 

Puleston is survived by his wife, Betty, a son and two daughters. 

Myrna Oliver Los Angeles Times

Ihsan Toptani

Politician and journalist
1908-2001

He was the doyen of the Albanian community in Britain, a keen member of
the Anglo-Albanian Association and a campaigner against the Stalinist
regime of Enver Hoxha and its successors.

Ihsan Bey Toptani, who has died aged 92, was prominent in the wartime
Albanian resistance to Italian and German occupation, and gave invaluable
help to the British military missions.

It gave him great pleasure to return to his homeland after the Stalinist
regime's collapse and to walk again on Mount Dajti.

Born as he was into the turmoil of the ailing Ottoman Empire, Toptani's
earliest memories were of his family's houses being torched by mobs loyal
to the sultan in Istanbul. He was the son of Abdi Bey Toptani, a signatory
to the 1912 independence proclamation and a minister in the first
independent government of Albania. The family were prominent members of
the land-owning class, and had dominated Tirana in the 19th century.

At the age of eight, young Ihsan was sent to school in Vienna, and
eventually took a political science doctorate at the University of Graz.
There, he became acquainted with Austro-Marxism, and convinced that
communism would be a deadly threat to his homeland.

On Good Friday 1939, Mussolini invaded Albania, declaring it Italy's
second overseas province (after Ethiopia). The operation was facilitated
by the fact that the Albanian army was run by Italian advisers. Soon,
three main resistance movements sprang up: the supporters of King Zog; the
nationalist republicans; and the communists, at first several quarrelling
factions, which were later united as the National Liberation Council under
Enver Hoxha.

All three groupings viewed the others with suspicion. Toptani, until then
inactive politically, made it his task to unite the resistance into a
common front - he was an observer at the leaders' meeting at his house
which led to the Mukaj agreement. Within days, however, Hoxha denounced
the pact at the request of his Yugoslav advisers, and the Communist Party
declared war on the nationalist republicans.

Shortly after this, Toptani heard that a British officer operating in
Albania was gravely ill. Under the eyes of the Germans, he moved
Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Nicholls through Tirana for an operation.
Nicholls died 10 days later, and Toptani arranged his secret burial.

British military missions had been active in Albania since 1943, and in
April 1944, Colonel Billy Maclean, Julian Amery and David Smiley were
dropped into the country's northern region. From Toptani's country houses,
they maintained radio contact with their Italian headquarters.

By autumn 1944, the Germans were leaving Albania, the communists were
winning the civil war and Maclean's mission was withdrawn - to their shame
and disgust, they were forbidden from taking any Albanians with them.
Toptani made a wretched boat journey, which included six days adrift
without food or water, reaching Italy with a handful of prominent members
of the nationalist resistance.

After the war, he worked for Newsweek magazine in Rome, before joining the
BBC Monitoring Service at Caversham, and retiring to Surrey in 1967. He
obtained British nationality in 1958.

To the end, he remained clear-headed, with diverse interests in languages,
photography, philosophy and computing. Befitting his status as one of the
last surviving holders of the Ottoman title "bey", he was a striking
figure, with distinguished aquiline features; he invariably wore a bow
tie.

At the age of 91 he was still making plans. "When I am 100," he said,
"provided the Albanian people have made use of those physical and
spiritual assets which have enabled them to preserve their national
identity over thousands of years, I will return to spend that time which
is left in my homeland."

Andrew van der Beek The Guardian, London