Robert Henry Mayerson (1953 – January 2, 1990) was a business editor at the South China Morning Post, and "one of those people born adventurous," his mother said. "He once helicoptered to the top of a mountain in Italy to eat a certain kind of cheese."

He was a graduate student at Columbia University.

When Mayerson first learned he had AIDS, he left his post as a business editor of the South China Morning Post because of the lack of good treatment in Asia. "There was something so bittersweet about that for him," his mother said. "He had always led an adventurous life. So to end up lying around on your childhood bed was very sad."

Mayerson was the son of Charlotte Mayerson, who wrote "The Death Cycle Machine," in 1996, a collection of poems on the loss of her son to AIDS.