National Post from Toronto, Ontario, Canada • A9

nationalpost.com A9 NATIONAL POST, MONDAY, MARCH 18, 2019 OBITUARIES I WAS SUPPOSED TO PLAY MORE OF A BOOM-CHICKY-BOOM BEAT, BUT MY STICK GOT STUCK AND IT CAME OUT BOOM, BOOM-BOOM CHICK. I JUST MADE SURE TO MAKE THE SAME MISTAKE EVERY FEW BARS. HAL BLAINE ON THE 1963 HIT BE MY BABY U.K.-U.S. researcher pioneer Barbara Low, who was among a core of female scientists whose research in the 1940s unleashed a bonanza of lifesaving antibiotics, and whose gumption gained her followers a foothold in a male-dominated field, died Jan. 10 at her home in New York.

She was 98. Her death was confirmed by Lucky Tran, a spokesman for the Irving Medical Center of Columbia University, where Low taught for nearly 60 years and was professor emeritus of biochemistry and molecular physics. Her death was announced belatedly because it took time for the university to gather biographical details, Tran said. role in identifying the structure of penicillin was something of a fluke. As a student at Oxford University in England, she was a of the future Nobel laureate Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, who, having been barred from teaching men, taught at Somerville College, a school at the time.

At Somerville, Hodgkin was a founder of protein crystallography, a process that can determine a three-dimensional shape by analyzing how X- rays bend and bounce off its crystallized form. She trained a cadre of students, including Barbara Low, in the emerging field. Low told Hodgkin in July 1943, according to the book Dorothy Hodgkin: A Life (2014), by Georgina Ferry. and all its degradation products contain sulfur. This is very Their wartime research helped transform penicillin the bacteria-killing substance that Alexander Fleming had discovered in mould in 1928 into a wonder drug that could be replicated, mass-produced and reconfigured to produce stronger antibiotic derivatives for the treatment of a broader range of infections.

Hodgkin had begun her career in 1932 in the laboratory of John Desmond Bernal, a pioneer in X-ray crystallography, at the University of Cambridge in England. At Oxford, she and Low focused on penicillin, which was first used to treat humans in 1941. Chemists were still trying to isolate pure penicillin so it could be studied and synthesized. They used rudiment- ary computers. But as Ernst B.

Chain, their colleague at Oxford, later said, final solution of the problem of the structure of penicillin came from crystallographic X-ray Hodgkin received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1964 for her breakthrough research in crystallography. The award citation went beyond her work in penicillin to mention her subsequent determination of the crystal structure of vitamin B-12 and other substances that proved vital in advancing medical care. Barbara Wharton Low was born on March 23, 1920, in Lancaster, in northwestern England, to Matthew and Mary Jane (Wharton) Low. She graduated from Somerville with a degree in chemistry in 1943 and later received her and doctorate in chemistry from Oxford. After emigrating to the United States (she became a citizen in 1956), she was a research assistant to Linus C.

Pauling, another future Nobel laureate, at the California Institute of Technology, and to biochemist Edwin Cohn at Harvard. In 1950 she was appointed an assistant professor of biophysical chemistry at Harvard, where she discovered a protein structural element in amino acids known as the pi helix. Low joined the Columbia faculty as an associate professor in 1956 and was promoted to professor in 1966. Her research there led to a better understanding of the protein receptor that responds to the neurotransmitter targeted by snake venom. She retired as a professor in 1990, but she continued to lecture at the university until 2013.

Her legacy at Columbia went beyond academics: It was grounded in a commitment to rectify the second- class treatment her mentor had received as a teacher at Oxford. the affirmative action committee, she was very forceful in wanting Columbia to live up to its ideals of having a diverse faculty and work Arthur G. Palmer, a professor of biochemistry and molecular biophysics and associate dean for graduate affairs at medical centre, said in an email. In 1950 Low married Metchie J.E. Budka, a fellow biochemist whom she had met at Harvard.

He died in 1995. A sister, Marjorie Elizabeth Camp, died in 2002. No immediate family members survive. New York Times News Service BARBARA LOW 1920-2019 Scientist bolstered wonder drug penicillin al Blaine, the ubiquitous drummer whose work in the 1960s and with Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, Barbra Streisand, the Beach Boys, Simon Garfunkel, the Ronettes and many others established him as one of the top session musicians of all time, died Monday at his home in Palm Desert, Calif. He was 90.

His son-in-law, Andrew Johnson, confirmed the death. Blaine, who played on at least 40 singles that reached No. 1 on the Billboard pop chart, was a reliable and adaptable musician, able to offer delicate brushwork on a ballad or a booming beat on records produced by Phil Spector, who was known for his Wall of Sound. Blaine brought drama to a transitions, often telegraphing a big moment with a flurry of strokes on a snare drum or tom- tom. If he had a signature moment on a record, it was on the 1963 hit, Be My Baby, produced by Spector.

The song opened cold, with Blaine playing and repeating the percussive earworm But the riff came about accidentally. was supposed to play more of a boom-chicky-boom beat, but my stick got stuck and it came out boom, boom-boom he told The Wall Street Journal in 2011. just made sure to make the same mistake every few Three years later, he used the same beat, but in a softer way, on Frank Strangers in the Night. Blaine was part of a loosely affiliated group of session musicians who in the early 1960s began dominating rock roll recording in Los Angeles. Along with guitarists like Glen Campbell and Tony Tedesco, bassists like Carol Kaye and Joe Osborn, and keyboardists like Leon Russell and Don Randi, Blaine played on thousands of recordings through the mid-1970s.

He famously said he gave the group its name, the Wrecking Crew, although Kaye has insisted that he did not start using that term until years after the musicians had stopped working together. His skills led producers to use Blaine as the drummer for various studio work, replacing their credited drummers. The drummer heard on the Beach records was often Blaine and not the drummer the fans knew, Dennis Wilson, whose brother Brian was the creative force. other studio credits include Help Falling in Love, Simon Mrs. Robinson, the 5th the Sunshine In, the Mr.

Tambourine Man, Strei The Way We Were, the Da Doo Ron Ron and Herb Alpert and the Tijuana A Taste of Honey. In 2000, Blaine was inducted into the Rock Roll Hall of Fame with four other studio musicians, including drummer Earl Palmer, who had helped introduce him to session work. The Recording Academy gave Blaine a lifetime achievement Grammy Award last year. Hal Blaine was born Harold Simon Belsky on Feb. 5, 1929, in Holyoke, to Meyer Belsky, who worked in a leather factory, and Rose (Silverman) Belsky.

When he was seven the family moved to Hartford, where he was inspired to learn drumming by watching the fife and drum corps of the Roman Catholic school across the street from his Hebrew school. of the priests noticed I was watching, and before long I was playing with these he told The Hartford Courant in 2000. On Saturdays, he regularly went to a theatre in Hartford to watch big bands, singers and vaudeville acts, and he grew to admire virtuoso drummers like Buddy Rich and Gene Krupa. When he was 14, he moved with his family to Southern California. He attended high school in San Bernardino while his parents opened a delicatessen in Santa Monica.

After serving as an Army cartographer during the Korean War, Blaine attended a drum school in Chicago run by Roy Knapp, who had been teacher. He began to play drums in strip clubs, and by the late 1950s he was working with a jazz quartet. He then worked with teenage idol Tommy Sands and pop singer Patti Page. He also played briefly with Count big band at the Waldorf Astoria in New York, filling in when regular drummer, Sonny Payne, was sick. Until the early 1960s, Blaine thought of himself as a jazz drummer.

But his work in the Los Angeles studios identified him, almost exclusively, as pop go-to session drummer. Once he established himself in the studios, Blaine rarely performed live. One exception came in the 1960s, when Nancy Sinatra persuaded him to work with her at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas; she put his name on the marquee and arranged for a nanny for his daughter, Michelle. And in the mid-1970s, John Denver brought him on tour. favourite time was with said Johnson, son- in-law.

were like brothers, and he was really torn up when John Denver died in 1997 when the single-engine airplane he was piloting crashed into Monterey Bay in California. Blaine is survived by his daughter, Michelle Blaine, and seven grandchildren. He was married and divorced five times. Blaine was far less busy in studios in the 1980s. By then producers were increasingly relying on drum machines, and more self- contained bands insisted on playing their own instruments.

He started giving drum clinics and worked on commercial jingles. He played most recently at a party for his 90th birthday at a Los Angeles nightclub. Jim Keltner, a drummer who also became known for his session work, recalled the first time he saw Blaine play, in the 1960s. can hardly describe the effect it had on Keltner wrote in the foreword to Hal Blaine the Wrecking Crew (1990), an autobiography written with David Goggin. was playing a beat heard thousands of times but was giving it a certain kind of sophisticated funk that never heard was he able to do these things with his New York Times News Service HAL BLAINE 1929-2019 Pop go-to studio drummer WRECKING CREW MEMBER PLAYED ON AT LEAST 40 SINGLES THAT REACHED NO.

1 KEVORK DJANSEZIAN THE ASSOCIATED PRESS FILES Hal Blaine holds up his hands after placing them in wet cement with Don Randi and Glen Campbell, representing the Wrecking Crew, following an induction ceremony for RockWalk in 2008. COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY VAGELOS COLLEGE OF PHYSICIANS AND SURGEONS Barbara Low in a 1960 Columbia yearbook photograph. Low was instrumental in developing antibiotics..