Many found this kind of parody witty. For some in Washington, it was a bit too biting.
Mr. Greenberg sold SGR in 1997 to the publishers John Wiley & Sons, who published it for about five years, Ms. Reif said, before selling it to F&S Publications. It folded a few years later.
As an author Mr. Greenberg wrote about the intersection of science, politics and money in two other books, “Science, Money and Politics: Political Triumph and Moral Erosion” (2001) and “Science for Sale: The Perils, Rewards, and Delusions of Campus Capitalism” (2007). He wrote regularly for The Times, The New England Journal of Medicine and The London Review of Books, among other publications.
Daniel Sheldon Greenberg was born in Brooklyn on May 5, 1931, the younger son of Max and Bertha (Rosenberg) Greenberg. His father was an accountant, his mother a homemaker. Three years later, the family moved to the Bronx, where Mr. Greenberg grew up.
His brother, Jack Greenberg, was the noted legal scholar and civil rights activist who succeeded Thurgood Marshall as head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. He died in 2016.
Daniel Greenberg graduated from Columbia University in 1953 and entered the Navy. On leaving the service in 1955, he joined the newspaper The Journal-Every Evening in Wilmington, Del. (it ceased publication in 1960), before moving to The Washington Post, where he worked from 1957 to 1961, when he took up a fellowship in Congress. He later worked for Science until 1970.
His first marriage, to Polly Hoben, ended in divorce. In addition to Ms. Reif, a lawyer whom he married in 1979, he is survived by four children from his first marriage — Julie, Margaret (who is known as Miggie), Cathryn and Liza Greenberg — and a stepdaughter, Gwendolyn Bradley, and 18 grandchildren.
Dr. Sarewitz recalled Mr. Greenberg as “cranky, cantankerous, intimidating a bit,” and added, “I did not love being interviewed by him.” But he said there were still far too many journalists who are “cheerleaders” for science.