Gobind Behari Lal, 92, the first newspaperman in the nation to use ''science writer'' with his byline, died of cancer Thursday. Lal had been associated with the San Francisco Examiner and other Hearst publications since 1925.

In 1937 he shared a Pulitzer Prize for distinguished reporting with three other reporters. Lal won many awards during his career, and Randolph A. Hearst, chairman of Hearst Corp. and president of the Examiner, said he was ''a truly remarkable gentleman and distingished journalist.'' William Randolph Hearst Jr., editor-in-chief of Hearst Newspapers, said of Lal: ''In the pursuit of a story he was tenacious and thorough.When on assignment, he was totally committed to getting the facts.'' Charles L. Gould, president of the Hearst Foundation, said Lal ''was a gentle man with a will of iron.''

Lal was a founder and 1940 president of the National Association of Science Writers.

He was a native of Delhi, India, and the son of the governor of the Indian province of Dikaneer.

-30-

The New York Times
Saturday, April 3, 1982

Gobind Behari Lal, Reporter; Shared Pulitzer Prize in 1937

SAN FRANCISCO, April 2--Gobind Behari Lal, a Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist and Indian patriot, died of cancer Thursday, a few weeks after writing his last news article. He was 92 years old.

Mr. Lal, science editor emeritus for the Hearst newspapers, worked for Hearst in San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles since joining The San Francisco Examiner in 1925. He shared the 1937 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished reporting with Howard W. Blakeslee of The Associated Press, William L. Laurance of The New York Times, John J. O'Neill of The New York Herald Tribune and David Dietze of the Scripps-Howard newspapers.

''My interest is to create among the readers a lust for the knowledge of science, which destroys superstition and all kind of false assumption and raises the power of the human brain,'' Mr. Lal said in an interview last week.

His efforts in behalf of Indian independence gained him some of India's highest honors, including the Padma Bushan in 1969 and the Tamra Patra in 1973.

Mr. Lal interviewed some of the most distinguished scientific, literary and political figures of the 20th century, including Albert Einstein, Mohandas K. Gandhi, Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, H.L. Mencken, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Enrico Fermi.

His works ranged from books about Indian nationalism to Science Digest articles on headaches, allergies and tooth decay. He was among the first newspaper reporters to write about cancer research.

He was born in Delhi, India, and received bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of the Punjab. After teaching general science and editing an Indian-language newspaper that campaigned for independence, he came to he United States in 1912 as a research fellow at the University of California in Berkeley.

''My original idea was to go back to India after Berkeley,'' he said, ''but I got caught in the First World War and I decided to stay here and do some work for the independence of India.''

Besides his Pulitzer Prize, Mr. Lal won the 1946 George Westinghouse Award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a 1958 distinguised service award from the American Medical Association and a Guggenheim fellowship in 1956.

-30-