Monday, November 22, 2004; Page B06

Robert Bacher, 99, a physicist who worked at Los Alamos Laboratory during the Manhattan Project and later became one of the first members of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, died Nov. 18 at his home in Montecito, Calif. No cause of death was reported.

Mr. Bacher was affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Radiation Laboratory and the top-secret Manhattan Project to build an atomic bomb at Los Alamos from 1940 to 1945. Once the bombmaking production phase began, he headed up the physics division. He was awarded the President's Medal for Merit in 1946.

He joined the California Institute of Technology faculty in 1949 and remained there for the rest of his career, serving as chairman of the division of physics, mathematics and astronomy and as vice president and provost. He retired in 1976.

Jasper Herbert Kane, 101, a biochemist who suggested that antibiotics could be manufactured in mass quantities rather than dose-by-dose in a laboratory, died Nov. 16 in Boca Raton, Fla. No cause of death was reported.

While working at the Pfizer & Co. chemical manufacturing plant in 1942, he suggested using a fermentation process to manufacture penicillin, streptomycin and other antibiotics. The idea helped steer Pfizer, at the time a chemical supplier for the food industry, toward pharmaceutical production.

The newly manufactured drugs were used in part to treat infected soldiers during World War II. Mr. Kane eventually became Pfizer's vice president and director of biochemical research and development. He retired in 1953.

George Canseco, 70, one of the Philippines' most popular songwriters and a former Associated Press newsman, died Nov. 19 of complications from liver disease and lung cancer in Manila, his family said.

Mr. Canseco won numerous awards for many of the more than 160 songs he wrote in a career spanning more than three decades, starting when he worked as an AP newsman in Manila in the late 1960s. Then-first lady Imelda Marcos commissioned Canseco to compose the song "I Am a Filipino," a hymn that paid tribute to the nation.

Mr. Canseco also worked as a cinema music director, and many of his ballads became theme songs for Philippine movies, winning him awards for best musical score. He also wrote songs made popular by many of the Philippines' top singers. An award for the country's best composers has been named after him.