Milestones

By Elizabeth L. Bland, Janice M. Horowitz, Victoria Rainert, Jyoti Thottam, Rebecca Winters

RESIGNING. J. CRAIG VENTER, 55, brash maverick scientist who raced to decipher the human genome and goaded competitors to do the same; as president of Celera Genomics, the firm he helped found in 1998. Conflict over the future of Celera, as it moves from selling gene information to developing drugs, sparked the departure.

RECOVERING. MARGARET THATCHER, 76, first female British Prime Minister; from a minor stroke suffered in Portugal.

RELEASED. NGAWANG CHOEPHEL, 34, Tibetan music scholar who served six years of an 18-year prison term on charges of spying and opposing Chinese rule over Tibet; in Sichuan province. The Fulbright scholar, who was imprisoned following his return to Tibet to videotape traditional music and dance, received wide media attention before his unexpected reprieve.

SENTENCED. THOMAS JUNTA, 44, hockey dad who beat to death another father at a Massachusetts ice rink; to a 6-to-10-year prison term for involuntary manslaughter.

DIED. CARRIE HAMILTON, 38, actress, musician and daughter of Carol Burnett and producer Joe Hamilton whose three-year adolescent descent into drugs made national headlines and prompted a family antidrug crusade; of cancer; in Los Angeles. A play she wrote with her mother, Hollywood Arms, will open at Chicago's Goodman Theater in April.

DIED. ROBERT NOZICK, 63, Harvard philosopher whose first book, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), invoked classical 19th century theory to argue that capitalist governments should play only a minimal role in human affairs, a position that today still defines the debate between liberals and conservatives; of stomach cancer, in Cambridge, Mass.

DIED. PEGGY LEE, 81, smoldering, velvety-voiced pop-jazz singer who started with Benny Goodman's orchestra and went on to record hits like Fever and Is That All There Is?; in Los Angeles. (See Eulogy.)

DIED. JOHN ARTHUR LOVE, 85, former Republican Governor of Colorado and, under Richard Nixon, the nation's first energy czar; in Denver. Love, first elected in 1963 with scant political experience, served a record 10 years. He lured many businesses to Colorado, but as a moderate often differed with fellow Republicans on the environment and abortion.

DIED. JACK SHEA, 91, gold-medal-winning Olympic speed skater; of injuries from a car accident; in Saranac Lake, N.Y. Shea, who won two gold medals in 1932 but refused to skate in the 1936 Olympics in Hitler's Germany, became the patriarch of the nation's first family of three generations of Olympians. His son competed in three skiing events in 1964, and a month ago, his grandson earned a spot on the U.S. Olympic skeleton team, in which sledders go headfirst down the ice.

DIED. STANLEY MARCUS, 96, pioneering high-end retailer who transformed a family-run women's-apparel store into the opulent Dallas-based emporium Neiman Marcus; in Dallas. Voted the ugliest boy in his high school class, Marcus went on to receive an M.B.A. from Harvard and made his mark in retailing with the introduction of personalized gift wrapping, in-store fashion shows and his legendary line of extravagant his-and-her gifts, which included a pair of Beechcraft airplanes.