Dr. Jack Cohen (1933-2019)

[ffutures]

Doctor Jack Cohen, biologist and SF author, died yesterday. He's probably best known outside the academic community for the Science of Discworld books, and also gave scientific advice to a lot of other SF authors including Anne McCaffrey, Niven and Pournelle, etc., me (for the Flatland RPG I wrote especially) and many others.He'd been in a hospice for some time, and his death wasn't unexpected.

He'll really be missed from the British SF scene.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Cohen_(scientist)

Comments

[coth]

I've had his address on an envelope to write to him, and if anyone had told me that the address I was given was a hospice, I might have gotten to write to him in time. I'm sorry to lose him, and sorry not to have had the chance to say goodbye.

[ffutures]

I sent a message when I heard he was ill a couple of months ago, wish I could have managed a visit but it just never happened.

[dormouse1953]

His scientific talks at cons were always high points for me, even if he did recycled the same jokes over all the years.

[ffutures]

Just a bit. But they were good jokes.

[eledonecirrhosa]

Oh damn. I'd just sent him a letter, as requested by the Eastercon newsletter.

Chatting biology to Jack at cons was always highly entertaining, and his SF biology talks were inspiration for my own. And you have to take your hat off to a scientist who found a bunch of other scientists called Jack Cohen and persuaded them all to write a genuine scientific paper by Jack Cohen and Jack Cohen and Jack Cohen!

[ffutures]

It feels a bit sudden, but he was already very ill well before Eastercon, and I suppose the dice just rolled that way.

I vaguely remember the story about the paper, but can't for the life of me remember what the paper was about.

After one of the first Novacons I went to, I mentioned Jack's scientific talk to one of the science teachers at the school where I worked - her immediate reaction was "What, 'Sperm' Jack Cohen?" She was working on her doctoral thesis on reproductive biology, and was basically trying to disprove his theories about the survival of the fittest sperm, working with pygmy opossums which have an incredibly low sperm count. I never unfortunately found out how that one came out, she moved to another school first.