Award-Winning Reporter and Photographer. Malcolm Wilde Browne, who spent most of his career writing for The New York Times, was working as a chemist in New York in the 1950s when he was drafted to go to Korea in 1956 where he drove a tank and was later assigned to write for the military newspaper, Stars and Stripes. After his discharge in 1960, he found a job in Baltimore with The Associated Press where less than a year later, they made him their Saigon bureau chief. He played an important role in elevating awareness of the problems in Vietnam to the highest levels at the White House through a photograph he took in 1963, when a Buddhist monk set himself on fire in public that year in protest of the government of South Vietnam. Browne was the only reporter there and he captured the stunning moment in a photograph which earned the World Press Photo of the Year. In 1964, he shared the Pulitzer for international reporting with David Halberstam, who was covering the war for The Times and he received the George Polk award for courage in journalism.  Browne, who studied chemistry as an undergraduate at Swarthmore College, also worked in South America, Europe, South Asia and elsewhere before he began writing about science. He left The Times in the early 1980s to work at Discover magazine but returned a few years later and continued writing about science and covered the Persian Gulf War in 1991.  Browne died of complications from Parkinson’s disease. (bio by: Louis M.)