“You’re looking at the first person who’s ever been cured of an abdominal mesothelioma, so far as we know,” he told the class. “I’m going to tell keep telling everyone, ‘I’ve got 20 more years’ work to do, so they’ve got to keep me going.”

“That’s a minimum,” Gould added. “I mean, I’d take 30 if anybody would give it to me. But I need 20.”

Gould has served as president of the Paleontological Society, president of the American Association for Advancement of the Sciences and curator of Invertebrate Paleontology in the Museum of Comparative Zoology.

He was also an adjuct member of Harvard’s Department of the History of Science. Since 1996, he has also served as Astor visiting research professor of biology at New York University.

Gould’s colleagues remember him as a man with a great breadth of interests.

Lewis said he discussed baseball much more than science with Gould.

“We used to find each other at Fenway Park and commiserate about the Red Sox,” Lewis wrote. “While I loved many of his Natural History essays, my personal favorite of his writings was about the disappearance of the .400 hitter—a phenomenon he successfully argued had resulted from the general improvement in the quality of the game of baseball.”

According to Director of the Core Program Susan W. Lewis, the final exam for History of Life will take place Wednesday, as planned.

Funeral arrangements have not been finalized, but colleagues said a service would be held both in Cambridge and New York.

—Staff writer Jenifer L. Steinhardt can be reached at steinhar@fas.harvard.edu.

For a recent interview by The Crimson with Stephen J. Gould discussing his last book The Structure of Evolutionary Theory please see: A History of Life