February 6, 2025

Jean-Claude Suares, 71, a Daring Times Op-Ed Artist

The cause was a bacterial infection, said his wife, Nina Duran.

For decades The Times refused to hire an editorial cartoonist or have art on the editorial page. But when the Op-Ed page was introduced in 1970, Mr. Suares — with the blessings of the page’s editor, Harrison Salisbury, and The Times’s design director, Louis Silverstein — adopted a daring idea: Rather than restrict artists to illustrating only specific passages of text, give them license to interpret an entire article.

The approach helped guide the paper into a new visual era and influenced other newspapers and magazines.

“It was time for a big change,” he said in a video history commemorating the Op-Ed page’s 40th anniversary. “I wanted the art to be well drawn, and I wanted to create some kind of emotional reaction.”

Mr. Suares spoke several languages, and he used them to recruit “a small posse of artists from around the world,” said Brad Holland, an illustrator whom Mr. Suares helped achieve prominence. Mr. Suares, he said, “gave us an opportunity to redefine what graphic art could be and do.”

The graphic designer Milton Glaser said Mr. Suares “made you feel you were working on something really important when he called you.”

Many of the artists he called were from Soviet bloc countries and fluent in surreal symbolism, which offered thought-provoking concepts instead of editorial cartoon clichés like Uncle Sam and John Q. Public. Captions were rejected. It was a form of visual commentary rarely found in other publications.

The “Op-Ed style,” as it came to be known, was characterized by black and white crosshatching and moody imagery, which some Times editors called lugubrious. Nonetheless, Op-Ed art was celebrated at galleries and museums.

In 1973, Mr. Suares arranged an exhibition of Op-Ed art from The Times at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. He also edited the catalog, “The Art of the Times.” But the show was his undoing. Because he had failed to obtain permission for the exhibition from his superiors, he was fired, though he continued to provide illustrations for the newspaper for many years.

Mr. Suares was born on March 30, 1942, in Alexandria, Egypt, to a Sephardic father and a German mother. The family later left Egypt for Italy, where Mr. Suares spent some of his teenage years. After moving to New York, he briefly attended Pratt Institute, joined the Army paratroopers and was sent to Vietnam, where a stint on Stars and Stripes, the Army newspaper, left him wanting to pursue graphic design.

His subsequent career was cobbled together from alternative and mainstream publishing ventures. Early on he was art director of underground papers like The New York Free Press and Screw. His early illustrations resembled 19th-century caricatures. He was later a design consultant for Scanlan’s Monthly, a short-lived muckraking magazine; founder and creative director of 7 Days and Poz magazines, and design director of New York Magazine, Columbia College Today and Connoisseur. He also oversaw redesigns for Variety, Publishers Weekly, Broadcasting Cable and Military History.

Over the last 30 years his comic drawings have appeared in The Times, on the covers of The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly, and in other periodicals and books. He wrote, edited or designed scores of illustrated books. He was also involved in book publishing. Working with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis at Doubleday, he designed Michael Jackson’s autobiography, “Moonwalk.” With J. Spencer Beck, he wrote “Uncommon Grace: Reminiscences and Photographs of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis.”

In 1976, the release of “The Illustrated Cat: A Poster Book” by Mr. Suares and Seymour Chwast started a craze for cat-themed books. Mr. Suares produced several more, including “Cats in Love,” “Hollywood Cats,” “City Cats” and “Sexy Cats.”

“His timing was great,” Mr. Chwast said, “He always knew what was going to be big.”

Beside his wife of 33 years, who is also an artist, Mr. Suares is survived by a sister, Josee Bauman.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: August 6, 2013

An earlier version of this obituary referred incorrectly to Mr. Suares’s mother. She left Germany many years before the bombing of Dresden in 1945; she was not a survivor of that bombing.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/06/business/media/jean-claude-suares-daring-illustrator-of-the-timess-op-ed-page-dies-at-71.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Promising New Cancer Drugs Empower the Body’s Own Defense System

The excitement has spread to Wall Street. Shares of Merck and Bristol-Myers Squibb, which are developing such drugs, rose more than 3 percent on Monday after data from their studies was presented over the weekend at the meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology.

The drugs, still generally in early testing, work in an entirely new way, by unleashing the immune system to attack cancer cells much as it attacks bacteria. That could be an alternative to often-debilitating chemotherapy.

Finding ways to use the body’s own defenses has been a goal since the late 1800s, when a New York surgeon named William B. Coley noticed that cancer disappeared in a patient who had a severe bacterial infection.

He then began injecting bacteria into cancer patients to rev up their immune systems. His claims of success were disputed and most attempts since then to harness the immune system have not worked.

The new drugs work by disabling a brake on the immune system called the programmed death 1 receptor, or PD-1. And although the data presented at the meeting was from the earliest stage of testing only, the drugs were the center of attention here, with some doctors predicting that cancer treatment was about to shift.

“If you look five years out, most of this meeting will be about immunotherapy,” said Dr. Mario Sznol, a professor of medical oncology at Yale.

Analysts, who predict billions of dollars in sales, are trying to determine which of the three front-runners — Merck, Bristol-Myers and Roche — have the best drug and how soon the drugs could reach the market. Some think it could be as early as a year and a half from now.

“I think all of you recognize this is a very special moment in oncology,” Dr. Roger M. Perlmutter, head of research and development at Merck, told analysts Sunday at a standing-room-only meeting.

Harnessing the immune system is appealing for several reasons. It might be applicable to many different types of cancer. It might produce longer lasting remissions than can be achieved by chemotherapy or the newer targeted drugs. And it seems somehow more natural and holistic.

“It seems the right thing to do to stimulate our body’s defense rather than take some kind of poison,” said Therese Bocklage, a cancer patient and pathologist from Albuquerque.

Dr. Bocklage thought she had bruised her leg moving a Christmas tree in late 2011. It turned out to be the return of the melanoma she thought had been successfully eradicated by surgery 20 years earlier.

She has been taking Merck’s experimental PD-1 inhibitor, lambrolizumab, as part of a clinical trial since January 2012, and her tumors have disappeared. “If I had had this turn up not last year but six years ago, most likely I’d be dead,” she said.

But there are reasons to be cautious. This is cancer, after all. Many other hoped-for miracles have failed to materialize. This is a conference that has hailed drugs that extend lives by only a few weeks as breakthroughs.

“We’re so used to failure, we get excited very easily,” said Dr. Kim Margolin, an expert on melanoma and immune therapies at the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance.

Most of what is known about the PD-1 drugs is that they shrink tumors significantly in 15 to 50 percent of patients. It is still not clearly established, though there are some hints, that the drugs will let people live longer.

And results seen in trials, under idealized conditions, do not translate perfectly to the real world. One poster presented here looked at use in Britain of Yervoy, a melanoma drug approved in 2011 that disables a different immune system brake. Median survival has been only about half of what was seen in clinical trials.

Moreover, just because the immune system is involved does not make something safe. Ask anyone with lupus, multiple sclerosis or other diseases caused by an aberrant immune system.

Yervoy, made by Bristol-Myers, has some serious side effects caused by overstimulation of the immune system. The newer PD-1 drugs seem remarkably well tolerated so far, though lung inflammation is seen in some patients.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/04/health/promising-new-cancer-drugs-empower-the-bodys-own-defense-system.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

DealBook: Rajaratnam Away as Jurors Begin 2nd Week of Deliberation

Where’s Raj?

The question began bubbling up shortly after 9:30 Monday morning as reporters and lawyers arrived at the Federal District Court in Manhattan for the second week of deliberation in the insider trading trial of Raj Rajaratnam.

Like most criminal defendants, Mr. Rajaratnam has not missed a day of his trial, and has stayed close to his lawyers during deliberation.

The defense team issued this statement later in the day:

Mr. Rajaratnam is absent from the courthouse today because he underwent emergency surgery on Sunday morning. Mr. Rajaratnam had developed a bacterial infection in his foot that required surgery. Mr. Rajaratnam has waived his right to be present until he can return. The Court has approved this absence. It is hoped that he will be recovered sufficiently to return to the courthouse this week. We thank you in advance for your respect for Mr. Rajaratnam’s privacy concerning this medical and personal matter.

Aside from Mr. Rajaratnam’s emergency trip to the doctor, it was typical verdict-watch atmosphere, with journalists and court observers sat idly, reading papers or chatting on the phone.

The Galleon networkAzam Ahmed and Guilbert Gates/The New York Times Click on the above graphic to get a visual overview of the Galleon information network.

At noon, word of a jury note – the first in two full days – sent a wave of people rushing into the courtroom. In short order the prosecution and defense team assembled in the courtroom, checking BlackBerrys and whispering to one another as they awaited the judge’s appearance.

But the judge did not make an appearance.

Instead, the lawyers filed into the judge’s chambers without a word and remained for more than a half hour. Presumably after the meeting ended, the lawyers left just as quickly, declining to answer the questions of the anxious reporters about nearby what had transpired.

On his way into the elevator, one prosecutor told reporters it was about “nothing profound.”

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=d10505a021ce379f762eea9e405cfdd9