Scientists

Robert A. Makofski, a retired Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory scientist and administrator who headed Howard County General Hospital's board, died of cancer Dec. 25 at Pen Bay Medical Center in Rockport, Maine. The former Columbia resident was 81. Born in Wanamie, Pa., he was the son of a coal mine fireman and a homemaker. "His father would not let him visit the coal mine until he had graduated college," said his wife, the former Cathy Lickteig. "His father did not want him to work in the mines.

Howard H. Seliger, a retired Johns Hopkins University biology professor who fulfilled a childhood fascination with fireflies by later investigating the science behind their light-making properties, died of coronary artery disease Dec. 20 at his Mount Washington home. He was 88. Family members said that he was an expert on bioluminescence. He helped to show that fireflies and microorganisms found in bioluminescent bodies of water have enzymes that trigger a chemical reaction that make them light up. Dr. Seliger was also principal scientist at the Chesapeake Bay Institute from 1972 to 1989.

With catch limits on Atlantic menhaden being tightened to end overfishing, a new study is getting under way to look at just how many of the little oily fish need to be left in the water to maintain the health of other fish in the Chesapeake Bay and along the East Coast. Under a $320,000 grant from the Lenfest Foundation , fisheries scientists from the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science plan to investigate where the balance needs to be struck between fishing for menhaden and preserving them for their value in the ecosystem.

First, the Army told Frank Olson's sons that the Fort Detrick scientist's death in a fall from a 13th-floor window of a New York hotel had been an accident. Then a presidential commission revealed that the CIA had given an unwitting Olson LSD as part of a mind-control experiment in remote Western Maryland only nine days before the fall, and concluded that his death had been a drug-related suicide. Now Eric and Nils Olson believe their father - a bioweapons expert who had told colleagues before he died that he wanted to quit the top-secret Special Operations Division - was murdered.

Room 110 of Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg Center for Physics and Astronomy bears a special name on the placard outside: Rocket Room. Inside, tiny screws, metal clamps, screwdrivers, power drills and colored zip ties cover tables and shelves, the remnants of four years of work building a 24-foot-long tube scientists will soon blast into space. A team of doctoral students and scientists is fine-tuning a rocket payload that will carry a telescope 250 miles above the earth's atmosphere.

Researchers from the Johns Hopkins University slogged through thigh-deep water to rescue tissue samples and evacuate lab animals when a flood crippled a cancer research building after Hurricane Sandy last month. "It was really an extraordinary community effort," said Landon King, vice dean for research at the university's medical school, who worked to save precious samples stored in large freezers after the power went out. "It could have been an absolute disaster. " In the darkened basement of the Koch Cancer Research Building, water rose until it stood more than three feet in places.

Always curious about the inner workings of the human mind, Dr. Elizabeth "Liz" O'Hearn spent Wednesday night listening to a colleague at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine lecture on new electric therapies for patients with brain disorders. An accomplished neurologist, Dr. O'Hearn "never stopped trying to learn and understand about neurological disorders," said Dr. Justin McArthur, director of the school's neurology department, where Dr. O'Hearn joined the faculty in 1997. The following morning, Dr. McArthur received a phone call from Johns Hopkins Hospital telling him Dr. O'Hearn — a clinician, teacher and researcher who broke ground in the field of neurodegenerative diseases — was dead, after being pulled from the waters of the Inner Harbor near her Canton home hours before.

When Elsayed Talaat first began working at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory as a postdoctoral fellow, he was assigned to a project exploring Earth's atmosphere. That was 1999. To this day, he's still dedicated to the TIMED mission, analyzing the findings of the Thermosphere, Ionosphere, Mesosphere Energetics and Dynamics spacecraft, a 1,300-pound instrument built at APL that has been orbiting Earth since 2001. Talaat's expertise makes him a fitting candidate to share the mission with the public through a new lecture series Beyond Earth presented by APL scientists at Columbia's Robinson Nature Center.

SPOILER ALERT: This story reveals features of the plot. Baltimore-born film director Barry Levinson has said his new eco-horror movie, "The Bay," about a Chesapeake Bay turned deadly by environmental abuse, is "80 percent factual. " Bay scientists and one activist who've seen it say the film, which opened Friday, does touch on some very real issues affecting the bay. But they say the artistic license taken with the facts and the gore that makes it a horror movie may overwhelm any back story about what's wrong with the Chesapeake.

"This isn't rocket science," assured John Azzolini, as he methodically attacked a lifeless mound of dough with his trusty rolling pin: four words that were music to my ears. John's a brilliant electrical engineer at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, and I was a guest at the house he shares with Mary Ann, his bride of 41 years. Both are native New Yorkers and they share an Italian ancestry: Her maiden name was Vinticinquo. What better locale than the kitchen of their lovely North Laurel home for me to receive the secret ingredients that make a genuine New York pizza?