ZAKRZEWSKI, Sigmund F. 1919–2005

OBITUARY NOTICE—See index for CA sketch: Born September 15, 1919, in Buenos Aires, Argentina; died March 4, 2005, in Amherst, NY. Researcher, environmental scientist, educator, and author. Zakrzewski was best known as an authority on environmental toxicology. Though born in Argentina, he was raised in Poland, and when Poland was invaded by the Germans, he enlisted in the. Captured in 1939, he spent the duration of World War II as a prisoner of war. Afterward, he studied chemistry and biochemistry at the University of Hamburg, where he earned a master's degree in 1952 and a Ph.D. in 1954. During the early 1950s, Zakrzewski worked as a research associate in pharmacology at Case Western University and Yale University, where he was also a postdoctoral fellow from 1954 to 1956. He then joined the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, New York, where he did cancer research for the next three decades, specializing in chemotherapy advances. His interest in the environment was spurred after he took a course at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1980 offered by the Environmental Protection Agency. Becoming aware of the negative effects a poisoned environment could have not only on people's health but also on civilization as a whole, Zakrzewski made educating people about these hazards his goal for the rest of his life. Retiring from the cancer institute in 1987, he taught classes in environmental toxicology at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He also published several books on the subject, including Principles of Environmental Toxicology (1991; third edition, 2002), Climate, Weather Patterns, and Human Behavior (1996), A Life in the Twentieth Century (1999; second edition, 2002), and Environmental Toxicology (2002).

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Buffalo News (Buffalo, NY), March 8, 2005, p. D6.