John W. Lewis was born Albert Lewis Seeman in Seattle, Washington on November 16, 1930. He received bachelor's and master's degrees and a doctorate from the University of California, Los Angeles. He became an R.O.T.C. cadet the day the Korean War began and served as a Navy gunnery officer after the war. He taught at Cornell University for seven years. While a professor there, he wrote The United States in Vietnam with fellow professor George McTurnan Kahin. He started teaching at Stanford University in 1968 and became a professor emeritus in 1997. His other books included Leadership in Communist China and China Builds the Bomb written with Xue Litai. He also served as an adviser to the Defense Department and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. He died from urothelial cancer on September 4, 2017 at the age of 86.
Sidney David Drell was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey on September 13, 1926. He received a bachelor's degree in physics in 1946 from Princeton University and a master's degree in physics in 1947 and a doctorate in physics in 1949 from the University of Illinois. After teaching at Stanford University for two years, he joined the physics department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He left in 1956 to work at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. He was the deputy director there for almost 30 years. He was one of the top advisers to the United States government on military technology and arms control. He received the Enrico Fermi Award for his life's work in 2000 and the National Medal of Science for his contributions to physics and his service to the government in 2013. He wrote numerous books during his lifetime including Electromagnetic Structure of Nucleons, Facing the Threat of Nuclear Weapons, The Reagan Strategic Defense Initiative: A Technical, Political and Arms Control Assessment, In the Shadow of the Bomb: Physics and Arms Control, and The Gravest Danger: Nuclear Weapons. He co-wrote several textbooks with the theoretical physicist James D. Bjorken including Relativistic Quantum Mechanics and Relativistic Quantum Fields. He died on December 21, 2016 at the age of 90.
