David Freedman

(Home News Tribune)

DAVID FREEDMAN
AGE: 89 HIGHLAND PARK
David Freedman, a self-taught engineer and inventor who built a storefront machine shop into an international biotechnology company, died on April 24 in Franklin Township, N.J. He was 89 years old and had lived for the past 57 years in Highland Park, N.J. As co-founder, president, CEO and board chairman of New Brunswick Scientific Co. of Edison, N.J., Freedman helped to design, manufacture and sell apparatus that enabled the growth, detection and storage of cells. The machinery was used in fields from cancer research to pollution abatement and sold from the United States to the former Soviet Union, from England to Israel to China. He held more than 20 patents. Freedman started New Brunswick Scientific as a machine shop in downtown New Brunswick in 1946 His brother and co-founder, Sigmund Freedman, supplied $1,000 in seed money from his winnings at poker while sailing home on a troop ship from World War II. Over the succeeding decades, the company expanded to 400 employees and $75 million in annual sales; it 1972, it went public on the NASDAQ exchange. The Germany company Eppendorf bought New Brunswick Scientific for $110 million in 2007, ending Freedman's six decades at the helm of the company. In recognition of the company's innovative products, Freedman was invited by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to participate in one of region's first trade missions to the People's Republic of China. As a result of that visit, in 1979, Freedman established both commercial and personal ties to China, befriending and collaborating with many scientists who had been punished during the Cultural Revolution for their expertise in "Western" sciences. Born in New York City on March 22, 1921, to Jewish-immigrant parents and raised in the anarchist colony in the Stelton section of Piscataway Township, Freedman discovered his mechanical talents while attending the colony's experimental, ungraded Modern School. Before he was 10 years old, he was operating a printing press that turned out copies of the Modern School's student newspaper, "Voice of the Children." While attending New Brunswick High School, Freedman assembled miniature stage settings, right down to a working swivel chair the size of a salt shaker. Freedman's formal education ended with graduation from New Brunswick High. He learned to be a tool-and-die maker in the National Youth Administration, a New Deal program. With those skills, he set out initially to become a machinist. Early in his machine shop's operation, though, professors from the microbiology department at Rutgers University which included Selman Waksman, the discoverer of antibiotics hired Freedman to repair a broken machine that agitated lab beakers. Freedman, in turn, invented a better shaker, a model that earned him his first patent and was the first staple of New Brunswick Scientific's product line.
Freedman is survived by his widow, Phyllis Freedman, of Highland Park; two sons, Samuel of New York and Ken of Hoboken; a daughter, Carol, of Highland Park; three stepchildren, Beth Wyman and Ben Halsted of Denver and Diane Halsted of Edison; one sister-in-law, Jacqueline Freedman of Shaker Heights, Ohio; two nephews, Stuart Freedman of Saddle Brook, N.J., and Raymond Solomon of Queens, N.Y.; one niece, Rebecca Freedman of Philadelphia; and ten grandchildren.
His funeral will be held at 9 a.m. on April 28 at the Rezem Funeral Home in East Brunswick, N.J., with burial to follow at Beth Israel Memorial Park in Woodbridge. In lieu of flowers, the family requests that memorial donations be made to Planned Parenthood, the Southern Poverty Law Center, or the Waksman Institute of Microbiology at Rutgers University. For information, directions or to send condolences to family, visit www.rezemfh.com