News

This week we said goodbye to our favorite Southern Jew in the Mountain West and most subtly voracious eater of life, Joe Lefkoff. Joe loved people and things so fiercely and yet so quietly: he loved a fluffy matzah ball, Moe’s BBQ, and spending hours moving between the hot tub and the swimming pool reading and sunning. He loved John Le Carre, Stephen Sondheim, Scrabble, and a well-crafted dirty joke. He loved grilling the perfect steak, going to New York and London every year to see the new theater, and chasing a royal straight flush on poker nights with his favorite guys.

Marvin Caruthers, a prestigious University of Colorado Boulder biotechnology professor and researcher, has been named the first winner of the Richard N. Merkin Prize in Biomedical Technology for his work in DNA synthesis. The award, which comes with a $400,000 prize, was created by the Merkin Family Foundation and is administered by the Broad Institute of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University.

Thomas George Marr was born May 19, 1952 in Saginaw, Michigan to George and Marie Marr. He died May 3, 2023 in Longmont, Colorado.

He had honorable professional appointments, including Senior Scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the Theoretical Biology Department, and Cold Spring Harbor, where he was Senior Scientist and founder of the Computational Biology Department. Tom had the gift of curiosity and an appetite for life.