Bob Baxter died on February 25 in Burlington at age 84. Long a member of Science for Peace, he was also for several years a member of the Peace Magazine editorial board, where I got to know him and enjoy his company. He used to take the Go Train to Toronto for our meetings, heedless of bad weather. His curiosity about arcane topics often sent me off to consult Wikipedia, and he took every appropriate opportunity to recite lengthy passages of poetry, mesmerizing the editors. (When had he memorized those poems?) He was also proud of being a rigorous skeptic and rejecting any statement that he considered scientifically unsubstantiated.
He was a biochemist, having received his Ph.D. at McGill in 1951. Then he had worked at the National Research Council in Ottawa for some years, before moving his family to Ethiopia in 1961. He taught chemistry at the university in Addis Ababa until 1973 and amplified the family by adopting an Ethiopian child. Then they all returned to Canada and he worked as a research scientist in Burlington until his retirement in 1992. He took on editing the Science for Peace Bulletin for some years. We will miss him.
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