Jacques Piccard, 86, a scientist and underwater explorer who plunged deeper beneath the ocean than any other man, died Saturday at his Lake Geneva home in Switzerland.
Exploration ran in the Piccard family. Jacques' physicist father, Auguste, was the first man to take a balloon into the stratosphere and his son, Bertrand, was the first man to fly a balloon nonstop around the world. Jacques Piccard helped his father invent the bathyscaphe, a vessel that allows humans to descend to great depths.
On Jan. 23, 1960, he and U.S. Navy Lt. Don Walsh took the vessel into the Pacific's Mariana Trench and dove to a depth of 35,800 feet -- nearly 7 miles below sea level. It remains the deepest dive ever carried out.
"By far the most interesting find was the fish that came floating by our porthole," Piccard said of the dive. "We were astounded to find higher marine life forms down there at all."
His son's company, Solar Impulse, said the discovery of living organisms at such a depth played a key role in the prohibition of nuclear waste dumping in ocean trenches.
Christine A. Durbin, 40, the oldest daughter of Illinois Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin, died Saturday at age 40 from complications relating to a congenital heart condition. She had been hospitalized for several weeks, Durbin spokesman Joe Shoemaker said.
She worked for 16 years for the U.S. Department of Agriculture in the emerging markets division.
Robert H. Foote, 86, a Cornell University animal scientist known for his pioneering work on in-vitro fertilization and cloning, died Monday of lung failure. Foote joined the Cornell faculty as an assistant professor in 1950 and became a professor in 1963.
