Paul Mead Doty (1920–2011)

Offered an attractive choice of PhD berths, he opted for Columbia, and the theoretician Joseph E. Mayer as supervisor. The war intervened and Doty was deflected for a period into work on heavy water on the periphery of the Manhattan Project. It did not impede his daytime research, which progressed rapidly: he and a fellow student, Bruno Zimm, built the country's first light-scattering instrument. This was not long after Debye had formulated the principle of the method, and their refinements of theory and instrumentation turned the technique into a staple of polymer science. Doty and Zimm in fact carried out and published the first study of a biological entity by light-scattering — tobacco mosaic virus. While still writing his thesis Doty received his first offer of a faculty appointment — at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, where the great panjandrum of polymer science, Hermann Mark, held court in company with several other luminaries. Doty lodged there for two formative years, but then he was awarded a Rockefeller Fellowship, allowing him to spend the first of what were to be two separate years in Cambridge. The Department of Colloid Science had little to offer him, and he had to endure the bitter winter of 1946 and the privations of postwar Britain; he recalled reading Paul Doty was a great man. He made a mighty and beneficent impact in two quite disparate spheres of human endeavour. He prevailed in all that he set his mind to by dint of intellectual dominance, clarity of vision, and sheer force of personality. In science it was Doty more than anyone who brought physical rigour to the study of biological macromolecules when the spotlight shifted from metabolic biochemistry to the bright new discipline of molecular biology. The appearance in 1953 of the startling, if still conjectural, DNA structure, and the promise of protein structures to come gave a heightened purpose to questions of their size, form and behaviour in their natural aqueous milieu; this was the field that Doty bestrode like a Colossus for close on two decades. The young Paul Doty was clearly something of a prodigy. Growing up, an only child, during the depression in the small town of Chicora in Pennsylvania, he discovered chemistry for himself, and set up his first lab in a garden shed when he was nine years old. Eagerly anticipating the first lessons at the local high school in …