Milestones: Jan. 16, 1984

SEEKING DIVORCE. From Margaret Heckler, 52, Secretary of Health and Human Services and former Massachusetts Congresswoman (1967-82): John Heckler, 56, austere, hunt-loving Boston financier; after 30 years of marriage, three children; in Arlington, Va. Heckler said his wife “deserted and abandoned” him in 1963. Secretary Heckler asked the court to dismiss his suit.

HOSPITALIZED. Danny Kaye, 70, peripatetic comic entertainer; after an attack of bronchitis incapacitated him during the Rose Bowl game; at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.

RECOVERING. Edward M. Kennedy, 51, Democratic Senator from Massachusetts, after hospitalization in Washington, D.C.; from a bleeding duodenal ulcer, anemia, viral hepatitis and dehydration; and Rose Kennedy, 93, doyenne of the Kennedy clan; from a viral infection; both at the family’s home in Palm Beach.

RECOVERING. W. Averell Harriman, 92, former Governor of New York and U.S. Ambassador to London and Moscow; from a broken knee suffered when the Democratic Party’s elder statesman was knocked over by a wave while walking on the beach; at his house in Barbados.

DIED. Richard Hughes, 77, flamboyant dean of Asia’s English-language foreign press corps, whose Bible-quoting, storytelling prowess made him “Your Grace” to generations of journalists; of kidney and liver diseases; in Hong Kong. Born in Melbourne, Hughes covered the North African campaign of World War II and the Korean and Viet Nam wars, and reported on Asia for the Times of London and the Economist. He was the model for the journalist Old Craw in John le Carré’s The Honourable Schoolboy.

DIED. Alfred Kastler, 81, French physicist who won the 1966 Nobel Prize for his studies of polarized light that paved the way for the development of the laser; in Bandol, France. Kastler was drawn to the study of light ever since becoming impressed as a child by a solar eclipse. A self-effacing scientist with outspoken political views, he was a pacifist who strongly opposed nuclear weapons and the war in Viet Nam.

DIED. Joseph H. Simons, 86, chemist who discovered one of the first practical ways to synthesize fluorocarbons; of Parkinson’s disease; in Gainesville, Fla. In the late 1930s, as a professor at Penn State, Simons found that passing fluorine through an arc of carbon gas produced a few drops of clear liquid fluorocarbon, but his discovery had no obvious use. A few years later, when scientists could not find enough fissionable uranium to build the Abomb, Simons rescued the jar of fluorocarbon from a filing cabinet. The resulting chemical reactions yielded highly fissionable uranium 235. By the mid-1950s more than 800 new compounds containing fluorocarbons had been developed.