Murray Gell-Mann, who firstposited the notion of the quark, is still alive and working in NEw Mexico. According to Science News:

Gell-Mann, meanwhile, remains active in research at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, where he continues to pursue ideas that are sometimes at odds with establishment views. He is particularly interested in linguistics, for instance, and collaborates with researchers at Santa Fe and in Moscow studying distant (in time) relationships among human languages.

"In that collaboration we seem to be finding more and more evidence … that a very large fraction of the world's languages, although probably not all, are descended from one spoken quite recently … something like 15,000 to 20,000 years ago," Gell-Mann says.

Language surely originated much earlier than that, he says, but most languages still around today may have descended from this mother of (nearly) all mother tongues, tentatively labeled Borean (as in "the north wind").

Of course, many experts resist the idea.

"For some reason, in this country and in Western Europe, most tenured professors of historical and comparative linguistics hate the idea of distant relationships among human languages, or at least the idea that those can be demonstrated," Gell-Mann says. "They put a tremendous burden of proof on anyone who wants to say that languages are related in this way, by this common descent." And so once again Gell-Mann faces what he calls the "negative principles of the establishment."

"Eventually I think everybody will be convinced that these relationships really exist," he says. "In the meantime, we're fighting one of these battles." And just as there's no evidence of constituents of quarks, there's no evidence that Gell-Mann will stop fighting such battles anytime soon.