WEDNESDAY, MAY 5, 2010

KLMNO

OBITUARIES

DR. HELEN M. RANNEY, 89

Explored sickle cell genetics

By Thomas H. Maugh II

Helen Ranney broke many barriers.

Helen M. Ranney, 89, a physi- cian who was among the first to explore the genetics of sickle-cell disease and scored a number of firsts for women in her profes- sion, includ- ing being the first to head a department of medicine at a U.S. medical school, died April 5 at her home near San Diego. A cause of death was not given. “Helen

Ranney was

an outstanding physician-scien- tist, a leader in medicine, a re- spected mentor and an influ- ential figure in our history,” said David Brenner, vice chancellor for health sciences at University of California at San Diego, where she ended her career. “More than any other person, UC San Diego School of Medicine today reflects her vision and leadership.” Dr. Ranney studied sickle-cell disease in the early 1950s, when researchers knew virtually noth-

ing about genetics and DNA. Phy- sicians knew the disease was in- herited, but they had no way to tell whether specific parents were likely to transmit it to their chil- dren or a newborn would develop it.

Sickle cell is marked by an un- usual form of hemoglobin, the oxygen-carrying part of the red blood cell, called hemoglobin S or HbS. Under conditions of stress, HbS distorts red blood cells into a sickle shape, hindering their abil- ity to carry oxygen and causing them to clog blood vessels. The disorder, which manifests itself mostly in blacks, can cause stroke, severe pain, organ dam- age and death.

HbS could be separated from the normal form of hemoglobin, called HbA, by a tedious and cumbersome procedure that was useful for research but not for making diagnoses. Dr. Ranney adapted a laboratory procedure called gel electrophoresis to sep- arate the two variants quickly and easily. Her process could be used to identify whether an adult was a carrier of the sickle-cell gene, be- cause adult carriers’ blood has roughly equal amounts of HbS and HbA. The procedure could

JOHN B. O’SULLIVAN, 66

Expert on energy regulatory practices

John B. O’Sullivan, 66, an en-

ergy lawyer who worked in gov- ernment and private practice and helped draft major regulatory re- forms, died of cardiac arrest April 23 at his home in Washington. Mr. O’Sullivan joined the inter-

national law firm of Chadbourne & Parke in 1981. As an expert on energy regulatory practices and transactions, he advised corpora- tions, public and private utilities, state and national governments and international organizations. After retiring in 2006, he re- mained senior counsel to the firm. Before joining Chadbourne,

Mr. O’Sullivan was chief advisory counsel at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and a member of the Senior Executive Service.

AVIGDOR ARIKHA, 81

Israeli artist who, as a boy, sketched scenes of the Holocaust

Israeli artist Avigdor Arikha, 81, who learned the power of art as a boy during the Holocaust when he sketched scenes from a con- centration camp onto salvaged scraps of paper, died of cancer April 29 at his home in Paris. The death was confirmed by Ja- nis Gardner Cecil, sales director for the Marlborough Gallery in New York, which represented him. Mr. Arikha, a painter, drafts- man and printmaker, went on to become one of Israel’s most im- portant contemporary artists, im- buing his portraits and scenes of daily life — a red umbrella against a wall, an overflowing bookshelf, a jumble of bottles in a cabinet — with enigmatic, disconcerting beauty. “He had an exceptional gift for capturing something deep in peo- ple and expressing their mystery,” French Culture Minister Frédéric Mitterrand said. The artist, who abandoned ab-

stract art for figurative work in the 1960s, was well known for portraits of subjects including Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, actress Catherine De- neuve and writer Samuel Beckett, a close friend of his. He also pro- duced many probing portraits of himself and his wife, poet Anne Atik.

Born in Romania in 1929, Mr. Arikha turned to drawing to cope with being sent to a Ukrainian la- bor camp at age 12. Seventeen sketches survived the war: One showed a pile of corpses in a wag- on and a naked woman’s body be- ing tossed into a grave. The drawings came to the at- tention of the International Red Cross during a camp inspection. Soon afterward, Arikha was per- mitted to leave with a group of children already cleared for re- lease, after he took the place and identity of a boy who had died, ac- cording to Duncan Thomson’s bi- ography, “Arikha.” The artist’s fa- ther died in the Holocaust, and his mother learned only that her children were alive in Palestine after the war. Newly free, Mr. Arikha lived on

a kibbutz, studied at the Bezalel School in Jerusalem and fought in the war over Israel’s creation, dur-

Avigdor Arikha’s “The Yellow Hat” (1997) is an oil painting on canvas. Mr.

Arikha was one of Israel’s most important contemporary artists.

The International Financial

Law Review called him a “princi- pal architect of the rules imple- menting the PURPA program.” PURPA was the Federal Public Utilities Regulatory Policy Act of 1978, which encouraged alterna- tive energy production and re- quired utilities to buy electricity from some small, independent power producers. John Benjamin O’Sullivan was born in Los Angeles and grew up mostly in Mamaroneck, N.Y. He was the son of a lawyer whose cli- ents included writer Mary Mc- Carthy and the Greek shipping ty- coon Aristotle Onassis. The younger O’Sullivan was the neph- ew of author and Academy Award-winning screenwriter Budd Schulberg. The O’Sullivan family’s sum-

Attorney John B. O’Sullivan

mer home in Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., was the site of meetings among political and anti-Viet- nam War ac- tivists, many of whom, like Mr. O’Sulli- van, worked for the presi- dential cam- paigns of Democratic Sens. Eugene McCarthy and George Mc- Govern.

The young activists included future president Bill Clinton and Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Taylor Branch, according to jour- nalist David Maraniss’s biogra- phy of Clinton. Mr. O’Sullivan was a 1965 grad-

uate of Princeton University, where he was All-American sa- berman and fencing team cap- tain. After graduating in 1970 from New York University law school, he became executive di- rector of Grassroots Action, a consumer advocate group in New York. In recent years, he led legal op- position to the D.C. zoning board’s approval to expand a Gi- ant Food supermarket in his Cleveland Park neighborhood. Survivors include his wife of 37 years, Susan Williams O’Sullivan of Washington; two daughters, Sarah O’Sullivan of Washington and Katharine O’Sullivan of Nor- walk, Conn.; his mother, Sonya O’Sullivan of Mamaroneck; and a sister.

— Adam Bernstein

also be used to diagnose the dis- ease in newborns.

Sickle-cell symptoms typically do not appear in infants younger than about 6 months, because newborns produce a different form of hemoglobin, called fetal hemoglobin, that suppresses the activity of HbS. Dr. Ranney’s process could identify HbS in their blood and allow parents to appropriately care for them. She used a similar approach to

examine other blood disorders, such as a form of thalassemia that had previously been identi- fied only in Asians. After identi- fying the disorder in a young black woman, Dr. Ranney visited the woman’s relatives in isolated black communities in North Carolina — places Dr. Ranney’s colleagues thought were too dan- gerous for a white woman to go alone.

She was greeted warmly, how-

ever, and was able to trace the disease through three genera- tions. Dr. Ranney’s report marked the first time the dis- order had been recognized in blacks. Today, blood disorders are much more easily monitored ge- netically. Helen Margaret Ranney was

born April 12, 1920, in Summer- hill, N.Y., where she was raised on a dairy farm and educated ini- tially in a one-room schoolhouse. She enrolled at Barnard College planning to study law but later wrote that “economists, sociolo- gists and the like study things you can’t fix, even if you could find out what was wrong. Medicine at- tempts to fix what it studies.” After graduating in 1941, she applied to the Columbia Univer- sity College of Physicians and Surgeons but was rejected be- cause she was a woman. She took a job as a technician at Babies Hospital in New York, where she gained laboratory skills that served her during her subsequent research. In 1943, Dr. Ranney was ac- cepted to Columbia’s medical school. She graduated in 1947, one of five women in a class of 120. She joined Yeshiva Univer- sity’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine in 1960. In 1973, she joined the UC San

Diego, becoming the second head of its department of medicine and the first woman to hold such a position. Dr. Ranney never married and had no immediate survivors.

— Los Angeles Times

S

B7

Sidney Goldstein

ECONOMIST

Sidney Goldstein, 91, a long-

time government economist, died April 14 at Holy Cross Hospital in Silver Spring of complications from a fall. Dr. Goldstein, a longtime Silver Spring resident, spent 30 years as an economist with the Census Bu- reau and Bureau of Labor Statis- tics and as a policy director with the Transportation Department, including work with the Federal Highway Administration. After he retired in 1976, he did

private consulting work on eco- nomics and transportation issues. He was an economics and busi- ness lecturer for several years at George Washington University and the University of Maryland. Sidney Goldstein was born in the borough of Manhattan in New York. He received a bachelor’s de- gree in social science from Brook- lyn College in 1939. He served in the Army during World War II. Af- ter the war, he received a law de- gree from Georgetown University in 1950 and master’s and doctoral degrees in economics from Amer- ican University in 1954 and 1957. He enjoyed traveling, painting

watercolors and studying Jewish history, religion and culture. He was a member of Congrega-

tion Har Tzeon-Agudath Achim in Silver Spring. Laura Schnitzer Goldstein, his wife of 66 years, died in 2008. Survivors include three chil- dren, Deborah Comarow of Poto- mac, Joan Freiman of Washing- ton, Maine, and Ira Goldstein of Manhattan; six grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.

—Timothy R. Smith

Richmond ‘Max’ Keeney

COMMISSION MEMBER

Richmond “Max” Keeney, 79, a pro-business Republican who served on the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Com- mission and the Montgomery County Council, died April 27 of cancer at Shady Grove Adventist Hospital. As a member of the planning commission from 1975 to 1992, Mr. Keeney supported business expansion in Montgomery. His pro-business views irritated some civic activists, who lobbied for his removal in 1988, but the council reappointed him. He was vice chairman of the commission in 1989, when he worked to preserve Hawkins Lane, an enclave of a dozen 19th- century houses near the National Naval Medical Center in Beth- esda, from development. Mr. Kee- ney worked to put Hawkins Lane on the county’s historical atlas. Mr. Keeney served on the Mont-

gomery council from 1967 to 1970. He voted against subway routes in the county.

Richmond Keeney was born in

Newton, Mass., and received a bachelor’s degree in history at Amherst College in 1952. He served in the Air Force from 1952 to 1956. After settling in the Washing- ton area in 1956, Mr. Keeney worked for the Air Force Associa- tion as its insurance director. He retired in 1997. In 1978, he lost a bid for Mont-

gomery county executive. Mr. Keeney collected stamps

and often read to residents at nursing homes. He was a member of Emman- uel Lutheran Church in Bethesda. Survivors include his wife of 53 years, Gail Conway Keeney of Montgomery Village; three chil- dren, Caroline Meyers of Am- herst, Mass., John Keeney of Chi- cago and Susan Brown of Beth- esda; and five grandchildren.

—Timothy R. Smith

Eileen Parker

USDA EMPLOYEE

Eileen Parker, 86, a secretary at

the U.S. Department of Agricul- ture from 1966 to 1991, died of re- nal failure April 20 at her home in Silver Spring. Mrs. Parker held clerical and

COURTESY OF MARLBOROUGH GALLERY, NEW YORK

Mr. Arikha used pastel on velvet paper for his “Self portrait in Striped Shirt” (2001). He began drawing at 12, after being sent to a Ukrainian labor camp.

ing which he was wounded in 1948. Recognizing his talent, sup- porters in Israel insisted he go to Paris to study, and financed him. Arriving in Paris in 1949, Mr. Arikha dropped off his bags at his hotel at 7:30 a.m. and ran to the Louvre, then fell asleep outside while he waited for it to open, the Marlborough Gallery said, citing the artist’s wife. He built on the foundations of his Israeli studies at the École des Beaux-Arts in Par- is, a city he adored and where he loved to go walking. Mr. Arikha’s works are in per- manent collections around the world, including the National Portrait Gallery in London and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Besides his wife, survivors in- clude two daughters and two grandchildren.

— From news services

secretarial jobs since the 1940s, including stints with the Recon- struction Finance Corp. and International Bank for Recon- struction and Development. She helped plan international confer- ences for the State Department from 1958 to 1962.

Eileen Owens was a native

Washingtonian and a 1941 gradu- ate of McKinley Technical High School. She was the sister of the late Joseph E. Owens, a four-term

Democratic state delegate from Montgomery County who chaired the Maryland House Judiciary Committee. Her memberships included St. Camillus Catholic Church in Sil- ver Spring. Her husband, Patrick M. Par-

ker, whom she married in 1947, died in 1986. Survivors include seven chil- dren, Kathleen Scutt of Syracuse, N.Y., Michael Parker of Annapolis, Kevin Parker of Washington, Be- linda Raminhos of Germantown, and Terrence Parker, Timothy Parker and Moira Parker, all of Sil- ver Spring; three brothers, Em- met D. Owens of Anacortes, Wash., Dermot M. Owens of Col- lege Park and James K. Owens of Medford, Mass.; and nine grand- children.

—Adam Bernstein

Patricia L. Roos

NEWSLETTER EDITOR

Patricia L. Roos, 69, who edited

aUniversity of Maryland newslet- ter, died April 28 of lung cancer at her home in Ashton. From 1974 to 1992, Mrs. Roos edited the Quotient, a monthly science newsletter at the univer- sity. The publication’s title later changed to the Compass. Patricia Lee Nord was born in

Wauseon, Ohio. She received a bachelor’s degree in political sci- ence from the University of Colo- rado in 1962. Mrs. Roos helped maintain

trails near her home. Survivors include her husband of 46 years, Philip Roos of Ashton; a daughter, Kirsten Roos of Ash- ton; her mother, Helen Riches of Wauseon; a half brother; and two grandchildren.

—Timothy R. Smith

Grant R. Sherk Jr.

EPISCOPAL PRIEST

The Rev. Grant R. Sherk Jr., 90, an Episcopal priest who founded St. Dunstan’s Episcopal Church in McLean in 1956 and retired as its rector in 1986, died April 9 at his home in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla. He had chronic obstructive pul- monary disease. Rev. Sherk was involved in teen outreach programs over the years. He helped start Alternative House, a Vienna facility for run- away and troubled teens. In retirement, he served as in- terim rector at Washington area churches and moved to Palm Beach Gardens from McLean in 1994. Grant Rhoads Sherk Jr. was born near Norfolk and spent his teenage years in Washington, where he graduated from Western High School in 1936. After Army service during

World War II, he graduated from the University of Virginia with a bachelor’s degree in 1948, and he received a master’s degree in for- eign affairs there in 1950. He received a master’s of divin-

ity degree in 1957 from Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexan- dria. He was a past board member of Shrine Mont, the diocesan confer- ence center in Orkney Springs, Va. His first wife, Ellen Nesom Sherk, died in 1983. His second wife, Frances FitzHugh, died in 1999. In 2002, he married Con- stance “Polly” Kelly. Besides his wife, of Palm Beach Gardens, survivors include three children from his first marriage, Marna Zok of Purcellville, Linda Postelle of Falls Church and Grant Sherk III of Fork Union, Va.; nine stepchildren; two sisters, Judith Wolfe of Aldie, Va., and Miriam Skillman of Richmond; a brother, Neville Sherk of Purcellville; 26 grandchildren; and 11 great- grandchildren.

—Adam Bernstein

Gertrude A. McNab

CHURCH MEMBER

Gertrude A. McNab, 92, a mem- ber of the St. Jane Frances de Chantal Catholic Church in Beth- esda, died April 27 at her home in Bethesda. She had a swallowing disorder. Mrs. McNab was born Gertrude

Loretto Albert in New York. Dur- ing the 1960s and 1970s, she did clerical work at the National In- stitutes of Health. Her husband, George McNab, died in 1986, and their daughter, Laura Hurley, died in 2007. Survivors include three grand- children and five great-grandchil- dren.

—T. Rees Shapiro Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58