John A. Endler

or so members, created with this aim in mind. The result was an invitation to the first Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs in Nova Scotia in 1957, and a visit to Moscow (the first of 22) the following year. This in turn led to his appointment to President Eisenhower’s scientific advisory committee on nuclear arms control, and thence to those of Kennedy, Nixon and Carter. Doty made firm friends in Russia with the likes of Kapitza and Sakharov, and these ties developed into an informal, but influential ‘Track II diplomacy’ channel. Such activities left him all too little time for the lab. He contrived to remain active in the affairs of Harvard: he was deeply involved in plans to overhaul the education system, raised support for the creation of a new Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, and became its first chairman. His eye for talent was unerring, and he had always been active in the recruiting of new faculty, most famously, Jim Watson. The new Department — ‘Camelot’ to one of its most distinguished members, Matthew Meselson — thrived bounteously. Doty even continued to deliver at least some of the lectures in his course on macromolecules, although most he left to his students and postdocs. I recall one late arrival in the lecture-hall, when he disarmed the restive audience by announcing that he thought it better to come late than unprepared. His research students were often fractious, unable, they said, to understand why saving civilization from a nuclear holocaust should take precedence over research on DNA. Doty had in fact imparted momentum to the flywheel, which continued for a good while to revolve in his absence. There were useful contributions to understanding the genetic code, to determining the direction of transcription, and later still there was an incisive study of the effects of mismatches in DNA sequence. All the same, the lustre of the laboratory was fading. Good students, postdocs and foreign visitors still came, and many lesser institutions might have been well pleased with the output, but Doty could not have been altogether content. His devotion to science was not extinguished; when one managed to secure a precious half-hour with him to discuss data he still displayed his preternatural quickness of grasp, and in an instant he could have leapt ahead of one’s own sluggish ruminations. Yet the allure of national and world affairs was too strong to be resisted. Henry Kissinger maintained that his bruising experiences on the Harvard Faculty had equipped him to confront hostile world powers with equanimity. The desire to exercise their high intelligence in a wider sphere has always afflicted top academics. There can be no doubting Doty’s passion and commitment to nuclear disarmament, and to better international understanding generally, nor of the magnitude of his achievements. But Helga Doty, who wanted to keep him in the lab, was heard to say of her husband, ‘Washington is heady wine to Paul’. In any event, it was some years before he finally decided to shut up shop and devote himself entirely to the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. He had founded this organization (now subsumed within the Kennedy School of Government) in 1974 with the support of McGeorge Bundy, President of the Ford Foundation, previously National Security Adviser to two presidents, and by no means a natural political ally. It was a tribute to Doty’s powers of persuasion. Amongst the alumni nurtured by Doty are several members of the Obama administration. Doty was a large man. I remember him as a genial blond Buddha. With his unmistakable well-modulated tenor voice, he was an impressive performer on the lecture podium, lucid, amusing and direct. His writing was a model of clarity and precision, all the more astonishing in that he should have been a confessed dyslexic. He took pride in the successes of his students, and indeed his record is remarkable: among his academic progeny are fourteen members of the National Academy of Sciences, one indeed a President. At a gathering last year to mark his 90th birthday he appeared in his motorized wheelchair, astonishingly unchanged in appearance, his memory and intellectual acuity seemingly undimmed. He chose the moment of his death, in control to the last. Helga died in 2004. He leaves a son from his first marriage, which ended in divorce, and three daughters by Helga.