Director's Sudden Death Leaves International Science Center In Limbo

Cyril Ponnamperuma, a professor of chemistry at the University of Maryland, College Park (UMCP), and president of the Third World Foundation, also headquartered in College Park, suffered a cardiac arrest in his office on December 20 and died shortly thereafter at Washington Adventist Hospital. He was 71 years old. At the time of his death, Ponnamperuma was serving multiple posts at UMCP, including directorships of the Laboratory of Chemical Evolution and the North-South Center for Sustainable Development. He had established the latter institution at UMCP, and had been in the process of setting up an advisory committee for it within the university. Ponnamperuma was well known for his work on the chemical basis for the origin of life, and for showing that the basic building blocks of DNA and RNA molecules could be synthesized outside living cells. His interest in this subject area goes back to his student days, when ...