Earl Ubell, 80, Veteran Science Reporter

Earl Ubell, who died yesterday at 80, covered the leading health and science breakthroughs of the post-war age with a lively and effective style.Ubell, who had a physics degree, worked as science editor at the old New York Herald Tribune from 1953 until the paper folded in 1966. While there, he won an Albert Lasker medical journalism award for his series of articles about heart attacks.He later became a science reporter and news director at broadcast network affiliates in New York and spent many years simultaneously as health editor at Parade magazine. He also wrote several books for juveniles and one aimed at adults called “How to Save Your Life” (1973).His stories often tended to feel like features instead of hard news. He began his front-page account of the first Sputnik flight in October 1957 this way: “Our planet has a new moon tonight.” This is often cited as one of his best opening lines, which he considered amusing because the story itself was cobbled together at the last minute.When the news broke, Ubell was at a conference at the Soviet embassy in Washington honoring the International Geophysical Year. He immediately went about the conference asking Soviet scientists and bureaucrats about the space launch.The official Soviet newspaper Izvestia later attacked as “a demented savage” when Ubell wrote that the satellite was invading American territory.While at the Herald Tribune, Ubell interviewed physicist Albert Einstein and wrote about Jonas Salk’s work on polio vaccine and Watson and Crick’s discovery of the structure of DNA. He was one of the early chroniclers of sex researcher Alfred Kinsey.He detested many conventional journalism practices, including the “inverted pyramid” style of news writing that places the key information up high and becomes increasingly less urgent.“It says, ‘The more you read me, the less interesting I get,’ ” he told an interviewer.Stuart H. Loory, a former Herald Tribune colleague who later became a CNN executive, called Ubell “an enfant terrible who did not like being pushed around.”Earl Ubell was born June 21, 1926, in Brooklyn, N.Y., to Russian-Jewish immigrants. He spoke Yiddish until he went to school.He joined the Herald Tribune as a messenger in 1943, then rejoined the staff as a reporter after returning from Navy service during World War II. He received a bachelor’s degree in physics from City College of New York in 1948.As a newspaperman, he became an authority on X-ray crystallography, a technique to view atomic and molecular structures and was invited to study at Nobel laureate Linus Pauling’s lab at the California Institute of Technology.Besides a stint in the mid-1970s as news director at WNBC-TV, he spent the remainder of his career as science editor at WCBS-TV. He retired in 1995, having completed a two-part series about his struggle with Parkinson’s disease.With his wife, he co-founded the Center for Modern Dance Education, a nonprofit community arts school near his home in Hackensack, N.J.Survivors include his wife of 58 years, Shirley Leitman Ubell of Hackensack; two children, Lori Ubell and Michael Ubell of Oakland, Calif.; three grandsons; and four great-grandchildren.

Earl Ubell, 80, Veteran Science Reporter

Earl Ubell, 80, Veteran Science Reporter

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