Overview

• Caltech said he died Sept. 6 at home in Massachusetts at 87; he is survived by his wife, Alice Huang, a daughter, and a granddaughter.
• Multiple outlets report cancer complications as the cause of death.
• He shared the 1975 Nobel Prize for revealing reverse transcriptase in retroviruses, a finding that enabled advances in HIV research, oncology, and gene therapy.
• A founding director of the Whitehead Institute, he later served as Caltech’s president from 1997 to 2006.
• He was a central figure in a late-1980s misconduct controversy tied to co-author Thereza Imanishi-Kari, who was fully exonerated on appeal in 1996.