MEN OF SCIENCE: Dick Taylor, DeStaebler and W.K.H. Panofsky in End Station A control room. Courtesy SLAC

Marge Lamping DeStaebler, '54, MA '54, always knew that her house, a ramshackle log cabin built as a summer home in Portola Valley's Woodside Highlands, wasn't her husband's cup of tea. The roof was terrible, the electricity spotty. Still, Hobey DeStaebler saw she loved it and "he was able to work through its quirky features," she said.

Only after his death did she realize how carefully he had cared for the house—and in turn, her. Tucked away in nooks—next to the furnace, in a fuse box—were careful notes about each problem with that feature of the house, dating to its purchase in October 1968. They were mostly numbers (To Hobey DeStaebler, "everything was an equation," she says), but they showed his thoughtful and thorough nature.

Professor emeritus Herbert C. "Hobey" DeStaebler, a physicist who helped design and worked at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center from its founding, died June 13. He was 79.

Courtesy SLAC

DeStaebler was born in St. Louis. He came to Stanford in 1956 after earning his bachelor's degree and PhD at MIT. He began his career on the Farm at the High Energy Physics Laboratory and then became part of a team with a vision for a longer accelerator—what we now know as SLAC.

DeStaebler worked as a senior physicist in W.K.H. "Pief" Panofsky's legendary electron-scattering group. The group's experiments helped develop the Standard Model of particle physics, a theory describing three of the four known fundamental interactions among the elementary particles that make up matter. DeStaebeler also played a key role in many of SLAC's scattering experiments later honored with a Nobel Prize.

One of DeStaebler's greatest contributions, though, was monitoring the safety and accuracy of the laboratory itself. When work began on SLAC B Factory, it was DeStaebler who made sure the design and implementation of the new equipment went smoothly. He retired from SLAC in 2003.

DeStaebler was an avid mountaineer who spent many vacations hiking the backcountry at Yosemite and Kings Canyon National Parks. In addition to his wife of more than 40 years, he is survived by two sons, Jim and Peter; and a brother.

ON ALERT: Gregg kept the world aware of health issues. Courtesy the Centers for Disease Control

In 1981, Michael Gregg, editor of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, published an editorial note on five cases of an extremely rare infection. The report noted that the patients were all male homosexuals, suggesting that the infection might be linked to sexual contact. Gregg had just alerted the world to AIDS.

An epidemiologist whose editorial efforts also brought attention to toxic shock syndrome, Legionnaire's disease and Reye's syndrome, Michael B. Gregg, '52, died July 9. He was 78.

Gregg graduated from Western Reserve U. School of Medicine in Cleveland. He entered the U.S. Public Health Service in 1959, working at the National Institutes of Health Rocky Mountain Laboratory before undergoing further training in infectious diseases in Lahore, Pakistan. In 1966 he joined the CDC and trained epidemiologists.

In 1967, he became editor of the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. Under his leadership, the MMWR was considered not only a compendium of disease statistics, but also a publication that could put that information into perspective for readers. In addition to its weekly publication, the CDC printed extra issues when warranted by national health events. Gregg published one such issue in 1976 when some patients vaccinated against swine flu developed the nervous-system disorder Guillain-Barré syndrome. After the MMWR issue came out, the national vaccination campaign was stopped immediately. "Distributing objective scientific information, albeit often preliminary, to the public at large, MMWR has filled that critical time gap between the immediacy of the news media's interpretation and the long wait for publication in the scientific journals," said a 1996 CDC report.

Gregg, known informally as the CDC's poet laureate, also edited a widely used textbook, Field Epidemiology, and led the CDC's epidemic intelligence service, which tracks down mysterious medical problems. He remained editor of the MMWR until 1988 and retired from the CDC a year later.

Survivors: his wife of 50 years, Mary Lila; three daughters, Jennifer Geise, Marianne Lawrence and Pamela McFadden; seven grandchildren; two brothers; and a sister.

TAKEN IN HIS PRIME: May with his wife, Corin (below), and his dog, Mulder (above). Courtesy seanmaymemorial.com

Sean May, '93, had left his desk at the district attorney's office and arrived at home—where he lived with his wife, then six months pregnant with their first child—when he was shot outside his house. May, of Denver, died later that day, August 27, at an area hospital. He was 37.

At press time, the Denver Police Department had not arrested any suspect and could not say whether the murder had anything to do with May's work. May had called a defense lawyer a short time before the murder, warning the other man that he might be in some danger.

Courtesy seanmaymemorial.com

May earned his law degree from the U. of Virginia in 1998 and joined the firm of Cooley & Godward in Denver. In 2001, however, he felt called to walk away from his lucrative job to be a prosecutor for the Adams County District Attorney's office. There he became a respected and successful prosecutor. In April, the man who often practiced opening statements before his dog received the Ed Towey Award for his outstanding service to victims of crime. Two months before his death, he had been named chief trial deputy, supervising 16 deputy district attorneys.

Survivors: his wife, Corin Flannigan; his parents, Bill and Pat; and a brother.

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