Eugenics

USC today AT OREGON When: 3 p.m. Where: McArthur Court, Eugene. On the air: Radio: 710. Records: USC 12-8 overall, 4-4 in Pacific 10 Conference; Oregon 11-9, 3-5. Update: USC has won its last four games at McArthur Court and has won six of its last seven games against the Ducks. USC is coming off a 51-45 loss at Oregon State on Thursday in which the Trojans committed 19 turnovers; Oregon won in overtime that night against UCLA.

Eugene Zinn, who spent three years in Nazi death camps and regularly lectured about the horror of the Holocaust after The Times profiled him in a 2005 front-page story, died of pneumonia Sunday at Northridge Hospital Medical Center, his family said. He was 85. Born in 1924 in the Czechoslovakian village of Huncovce, he was one of four children of Heinrich and Helen Zinn. Sent to Auschwitz with four male cousins in 1942, Eugene was the only one to survive. He soon learned that his parents and two younger sisters had been sent to the gas chamber upon arriving at a Polish death camp, and his older brother had been beaten to death.

Eugene van Tamelen, a Stanford chemist who was a pioneer in determining the structure of complex natural molecules and then synthesizing them, died Dec. 12 of cancer, the university announced. He was 84. He was "an exceptional intellect, with an extraordinary imagination," said chemist John Brauman, now a professor emeritus at Stanford. "He was constantly inventing new reactions and new approaches to interesting molecules." Van Tamelen liked being different and he liked being first, colleagues said, and the problems he worked on had to be big ones, typically involving molecules much more complex than anyone had been able to make before.

For someone in the midst of a professional crisis, Susan Sarandon is the picture of calm as she sips tea in a private Greenwich Village club. A head of curls is tucked under a newsboy cap, and her delicate porcelain features are remarkably ageless. You could almost imagine her living as long as the character who is presently torturing her: Queen Marguerite in Eugene Ionesco's "Exit the King," the "ruthless cow" and abused consort for 283 years of the titular Berenger the First.

A former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. investment banking associate who helped mastermind a $6.7-million insider trading ring was sentenced Thursday to almost five years in prison for misusing information from an analyst, a juror and a magazine. Eugene Plotkin, who worked in the fixed-income research division of Goldman, the largest U.S. securities firm by market value, is one of two men who orchestrated a scheme to trade on secret tips from a Merrill Lynch & Co.

Eugene Biscailuz joined the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department as a deputy in 1907. He retired more than half a century later, including 26 years as the county's top cop. Before becoming sheriff, he made his name in a sensational hunt for a killer, bringing back escaped murderer "Tiger Woman" Clara Phillips from Honduras. He also served as first superintendent of the California Highway Patrol and was credited with modernizing it, making it a model for other states.

Dr. Eugene Saenger, the Ohio radiologist who contributed greatly to medical knowledge about the effects of radiation on the human body, and who was sued for his role in controversial 1960s studies on cancer patients, died Sunday. He was 90 and had been battling bladder cancer. "Eugene Saenger was one of the real pioneers in assessing the acute effects of radiation," said Dr. Henry N. Wellman of the Indiana University Medical Center.

Memo to Georgia: The road, this week, does not lead back to you. It leads to Oregon. Not generally considered the cradle of anything except rain, Oregon is suddenly a cross-legged guru from which all college football eminence flows. No. 6 California plays at No. 11 Oregon in Eugene in a marquee game being televised by ABC and announced by former Oregon quarterback Dan Fouts.