Ralph Lewin, marine biologist and contributor to Nature, died last week.

Lewin’s scientific career focused on the physiology and biochemistry of marine microbes, which he studied at Yale in the 1950s and at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California from the 1960s until his retirement a few years ago. But his outside interests were wide-ranging and notably eclectic.

“He has been a longstanding regular contributor to many sections of Nature, as well as frequently pulling us up on matters of accuracy in the details,” says Maxine Clarke, executive editor. His pieces sometimes posed imaginative questions like “Why are cows not green?” (subscription). Other notes flagged up corrections as gentle and droll as they were fastidious. Those that made it into print (and at least one that made it into blog) give a nice glimpse of the man. One sample:

SIR –

When you wrote about the report … on locating radium-labelled click beetles (Agriotes sp.) with a Geiger-Müller counter (Nature 17 October 1996, ix), you might have mentioned a method described many years earlier by J. M. Barrie, whereby the sound of ticking served to localize a crocodile that had ingested an 8-day alarm clock.

Lewin’s short poems have graced the pages of both Nature (subscription) and Microbe Magazine (subscription). To The Great Beyond’s annals of science songs, we add “Stem Cells [to the tune of ‘Freight Train’]” in his honour.

Among his other achievements, Lewin wrote a popular science book surveying coprology, the study of poop.

He also spent some scholarly energy on Pooh, as in Winnie, translating A. A. Milne’s classic children’s story into Esperanto (a language that Lewin praised in a Nature book review (subscription) as “perfectly phonetic… much more logical in construction than English”). In the early sixties, he got two algal-physiology papers written in Esperanto into the journal Plant & Cell Physiology.