Prof Mistakenly Reported Dead

It’s not every day that a scientist reads about his own death in the newspaper.

But that was exactly what happened when the San Francisco Chronicle mentioned “the late famed Harvard entomologist E. O. Wilson” in an article about the sex lives of wild turkeys on March 3rd.

As a matter of fact, Pellegrino University Research Professor Edward O. Wilson is still alive.

“To the best of my knowledge, he’s fine,” said Jay L. Taft, Director of Administration for the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, where Wilson conducts his research.

Wilson did not respond to phone and e-mail inquiries to personally confirm that his life was not over.

The author of the article reported that his journalistic gaffe did not go unobserved.

David Perlman, the Chronicle Science Editor who wrote the article suggesting Wilson was deceased, wrote in an e-mail that he “suffered 22 e-mailed corrections from outraged readers the same day that the article appeared.”

“Most of the e-mailed ‘gotcha’ messages were either scathing, holier-than-thou or comments on the fallibility of all journalism,” he wrote. “I knew damn well I’d just been plain sloppy and careless.”

One tracker of erroneous death reports makes her findings public—web content developer Laurie D.T. Mann, who maintains a web page dedicated to quashing and confirming celebrity death rumors.

Her site, www.deadpeople.info, verifies that musicians Sir Paul McCartney, B.B. King, “Weird Al” Yankovic, Jimmy Buffett, and Whitney Houston, as well as perennial acting superstar Scott Baio, all remain alive.

The site confirms the deaths, for example, of Generalissimo Francisco Franco and Andy Kaufman under the heading “People Who Are Still Dead.”

Although her site requires frequent updates, Mann wrote in an e-mail that she strives for accuracy above all else.

“I am pretty careful, so most errors tend to be errors in transcription rather than errors in fact,” she wrote. “I’d rather be late in reporting a death than wrong.”

For the most part, according to Perlman, it seems that newspapers generally correctly report people as either dead or alive.

“I can’t remember prematurely killing anyone else before,” Perlman wrote. “The ones I’ve actually buried in print have already been dead.”

Perlman conveyed his apologies to Wilson by phone and e-mail, but received no response, he wrote.

Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science Harry R. Lewis could not recall an inaccurate death report at Harvard during his tenure as Dean of the College.

“I can’t remember a case where we thought someone had died but he actually hadn’t,” Lewis said.

Wilson’s career spans—not spanned—over 50 years, and includes ground-breaking research in entomology and sociobiology. He has authored two Pulitzer Prize-winning books and has received many of the top worldwide honors in science.