Sir Edward Abraham, 85, an Oxford University professor and biochemist who played an important role in the development of penicillin, died Sunday in Oxford, England, his family said.

As a researcher at Oxford, Sir Edward worked with Ernest Chain and Howard Florey on the purification of penicillin, and went on to develop the cephalosporin class of antibiotics now used extensively in the treatment of respiratory infections such as pneumonia and bronchitis.

Saul Steinberg, 84, the artist whose drawings appeared in the New Yorker for more than half a century, elevating comic illustration to fine art, died yesterday at his home in Manhattan.

He was compared with Picasso, Klee, Miro, Duchamp, Daumier, Beckett, Pirandello, Ionesco, Chaplin and Joyce. But Steinberg was known to most people, as he lamented late in life, as "the man who did that poster." That poster, one of the most famous American drawings, portrays a New Yorker's short-sighted view of the rest of the world, in which everything in the landscape recedes according to its cultural distance from Manhattan.

Vern Countryman, 81, a retired professor at Harvard Law School who was a specialist on commercial and bankruptcy law, died May 2 in Cambridge, Mass.

Charles K. McWhorter, 77, who served under Vice President Richard M. Nixon and remained active in Republican politics throughout his life, died Monday in Boston from injuries suffered in a May 1 car accident.