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Starting in 1966, Dr. Henderson, known as D. A., led the World Health Organization’s war on the smallpox virus. He achieved success astonishingly quickly. The last known case was found in a hospital cook in Somalia in 1977. (McNeil Jr., 8/21)

D.A. Henderson picked up right away. What I thought would be a five-minute conversation stretched to an hour and a half. He talked thoughtfully about his view that society should destroy all remaining smallpox samples, given that an effective vaccine exists and that maintaining live samples risks accidental infections or, worse, vials falling into terrorists' hands. He recalled that during his tenure as dean of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, it was nearly impossible to keep tabs on all the specimens that all the quirky researchers kept in laboratory deep freezers. The smallpox discovery at NIH was serious, but he understood how something could get overlooked for decades. (Dennis, 8/21)

There are few people in the field of global public health so well-known that you merely need to utter two initials to evoke instant recognition. But to raise in conversation Dr. Donald Ainslee Henderson, the man who led the successful effort to eradicate smallpox, all anyone ever bothered to say was “D.A.”Henderson, a few weeks shy of his 88th birthday, died late Friday of complications that arose after he recently fractured a hip. (Branswell, 8/21)