Conan O'Brien Lost Both His Parents This Week

This has been a devastating week for Conan O'Brien and his five siblings. Their parents, who had been married for 66 years, died at their home in Brookline, Massachusetts, within three days of each other, Us Magazine reports. Dr. Thomas O'Brien, 95, died on Monday and Ruth Reardon O'Brien, 92, died on Thursday, reports People.

• Dr. O'Brien was a renowned epidemiologist who didn't retire until he was 90. A Boston Globe obituary describes him as a "visionary" who sounded the alarm decades ago "about the increasing danger of antimicrobial resistance in a world growing ever more connected." He traveled the world to build a "network of physicians, researchers, and technicians whose observations and testing became part of a larger effort," per the Globe.

• Ruth Reardon O'Brien was a trailblazer in her own field. According to a separate obituary, she was one of only four women in her law school class and was the second woman to become a partner at the Boston law firm Ropes & Gray.
• "Science has said there's no such thing as perpetual motion, but my father was proof that that was wrong," Conan O'Brien told the Globe. "My father was in constant motion. And he was interested in everything—absolutely everything." That included comedy. Conan said his father—"often the funniest guy in the room"—introduced his children to classic comedy including Marx Brothers movies and Jack Benny's radio shows. "The loudest I've ever heard anybody laugh was sitting next to him in a theater watching Peter Sellers in a Pink Panther movie," he said.

(More Conan O'Brien stories.)