Paul Doty, 91, presidential adviser on nuclear arms control

December 06, 2011|By Bryan Marquard, Globe Staff

With one foot planted in Harvard Yard, the other among scientists in the Soviet Union, Paul Doty became a leading adviser to successive presidential administrations on nuclear arms control as he bridged the intellectual divide during the Cold War.

As founder of what is now the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard, he also nurtured a generation of policy makers who have helped shape nonproliferation accords. Its graduates have continued, into the Obama administration, to advise world leaders on the most complex, delicate, and dangerous aspects of science and technology.

“Paul had a vision of the role of science in the service of international security, and today so many of his apprentices are working to realize that vision,’’ Ashton B. Carter, deputy secretary of defense, wrote in an e-mail. “However, we could work a lifetime and still not repay all that Paul gave to us with his leadership and, most importantly, his friendship. He will be beyond missed.’’

Dr. Doty, director emeritus of the Belfer Center and the Mallinckrodt Professor Emeritus of Biochemistry at Harvard, died of congestive heart failure in his Cambridge home yesterday. He was 91.

While offering nuclear arms advice to secretaries of state and defense, members of Congress, and presidential administrations from Dwight D. Eisenhower to Jimmy Carter, Dr. Doty kept his day job as a scientist and professor who sensed the need to break new ground at Harvard.

In the late 1960s, he launched the department of biochemistry and molecular biology, which was remarkable for the array of talent he brought into his fold. Among his initial faculty appointments, three were awarded Nobel Prizes and 14 of his research students went on to be elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Dr. Doty was elected to the academy in the late 1950s.

“Paul was a great picker of people with talent and promise, but he was also a great mentor in encouraging their development,’’ said Graham Allison, current director of the Belfer Center.

Through his work in academia and arms control, Dr. Doty “led parallel lives,’’ said Dr. Dorothy Zinberg, a lecturer in science, technology, and public policy at the Belfer Center who has known Dr. Doty since the 1960s. “The people in his laboratory wondered where he was when he was off doing arms control, and the people in arms control wondered where he was when he was doing biochemistry.’’

Those lives, however, “were closely linked,’’ said Albert Carnesale, chancellor emeritus and professor of public policy and engineering at the University of California at Los Angeles and a former provost at Harvard.