ITHACA, N.Y. (AP) – Robert H. Foote, a Cornell University animal scientist known for his pioneering work on in vitro fertilization and cloning, has died. He was 86.

Foote – who the university says died Monday of lung failure – joined the Cornell faculty as an assistant professor in 1950 and became a professor in 1963.

He received his first research grants and began studying DNA in rabbits in 1958. That work later was used as a model for animal and human in vitro fertilization techniques and is credited as one of the first steps in the scientific advances toward animal cloning.

Foote also conducted the early research that led to the understanding that all female mammals are born with a finite number of eggs that are depleted over a lifetime by degeneration and ovulation.

Maj. Robert R. Furman dies

ADAMSTOWN, Md. (AP) – Former Army Maj. Robert R. Furman, who secretly supervised an Allied roundup of top German scientists and European uranium stocks during World War II, has died. He was 93.

Furman also helped supervise construction of the Pentagon during his Army career from 1940 to 1946.

Furman died Oct. 14 at the Buckingham’s Choice retirement community in Adamstown, said his granddaughter, Caitlin Furman. He died of metastatic melanoma.

His role in the development of the atomic bomb was cloaked in secrecy. Furman’s name did not appear in official documents for decades and he was known as the “Mysterious Major,” according to historian Thomas Powers, who met Furman in the late 1980s while working on “Heisenberg’s War,” a book about German bomb-building efforts.

Writer William Wharton dies at 82

ENCINITAS, Calif. (AP) – William Wharton, the painter-turned-author whose first novel “Birdy” won the National Book Award and became a critically acclaimed movie, has died. He was 82.

Wharton died Wednesday in Encinitas of an infection he contracted while being hospitalized for blood pressure problems, his son Matt du Aime told The New York Times.

Wharton was in his 50s and living as a painter in Paris when “Birdy” was published in 1979. The novel, about a shell-shocked World War II veteran who thinks he is a bird, fed on Wharton’s own experience as a soldier and longtime keeper of canaries.

Critics praised Wharton for being able to construct a compelling, believable narrative out of such a seemingly inconceivable plot.

The 1984 film version of “Birdy” was directed by Alan Parker and starred Nicolas Cage and Matthew Modine.

Two of Wharton’s other novels were also made into movies: “Dad” (1981), about a middle-aged painter living in France, and “A Midnight Clear” (1982), about a peaceable Christmastime encounter between U.S. and German soldiers during World War II.