Paul M. Doty personal archive,

Paul Mead Doty (1920-2011) was the Mallinckrodt Professor of Biochemistry (1968-1988) at Harvard University. During his forty-two years on the Harvard faculty Doty embraced two careers: biochemistry, in which he founded the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (1967), and arms control and international security studies, in which he founded the Program in Science and International Affairs (1973).

Doty was born on June 1, 1920 in Charleston, West Virginia and moved to Chicora, Pennsylvania in 1927. He graduated from Pennsylvania State University in 1941 and received a PhD from Columbia University in 1944. He served as an Instructor at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute (1943-1946), Rockefeller Fellow at Cambridge University (1946-1947), and Assistant Professor at Notre Dame University (1947-1948) before coming to Harvard (1948) where he was appointed Associate Professor (1950) and Professor (1956).

Doty’s research at Harvard focused on protein and DNA structure especially in the recombination of separate DNA strands, a key to much of modern biotechnology. During his first twenty years at Harvard, Doty was a member of the Department of Chemistry. In 1967, he helped found the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and served as its first chairman (1967-1970). In 1973, with the support of the Ford Foundation, Doty established the Program in Science and International Affairs and served as its director on a half-time basis; in 1979 the Program evolved within the new Kennedy School of Government into a permanent Center for Science and International Affairs. Under Doty's leadership, the Center trained more than a dozen scholars each year in international security studies, and established a Harvard College course entitled The Nuclear Age, and the journal International Security (1976). The Center was renamed the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs in 1997.

Doty’s second career involving international security had its origins in his work on isotope separation for the Manhattan Project. From 1953 to 1954, Doty served on the United States Technological Capabilities Panel of the Science Advisory Committee of the Office of Defense Mobilization, formed to better understand the nuclear threat that could be posed by the Soviet Union to the United States. In 1957 Doty chaired the Federation of American Scientists and attended the first unofficial meeting of American and Soviet nuclear scientists in Pugwash, Nova Scotia, which later grew into the Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs. Here Doty made contact with Soviet scientists and decided that an opportunity existed to promote discussion of the technical aspects related to avoiding nuclear war outside of official government channels. In 1959, he became a consultant to the President’s Science Advisory Committee (PSAC) helping in the formulation of nuclear arms control proposals. This work provided Doty, an inside view of a wide range of scientific and military affairs. His work on the Committee led to the first examination of the harmful effects of pesticides on plants and animals and a reduced investment in civil defense.

In 1960, Doty undertook two initiatives: the formation of a National Academy of Sciences committee to promote and oversee the exchange of Soviet and American scientists for research purposes and the organization of two Pugwash Conferences, one in Moscow (1960), and the other in the United States (1961). These conferences provided a forum for international discussions among scientists on nuclear problems, and revealed that scientific collaboration could play a useful role despite the polarization of the Cold War. During these meetings, Doty established friendships with several leading Soviet scientists, including Peter Kapitza. In 1964, Doty formed the bilateral Soviet-American Disarmament Studies group, co-chaired by Mikhail Dmitrievich Millionshchikov, first vice-president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. The work of this group influenced the Soviet Union to negotiate the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty concluded in 1972. In 1969, Henry Kissinger, National Security Advisor to President Richard M. Nixon, asked Doty to convene an informal advisory group to provide him with advice on nuclear weapons, missile defense, and related arms control issues. After 1971, Doty continued as a consultant to the Arms Control and Defense Agency and later became a member of the President’s Arms Control Advisory Group.

In 1973, Doty’s interests in national and international security affairs found a more formal outlet when he began a series of annual summer workshops on arms control, international security, and international science policy at the Aspen Institute in Colorado. Additionally in 1976, Doty became a board member of the Aspen Institute in Berlin where he initiated summer workshops on European security. Informal dialogue between the United States and the Soviet Union expanded sharply in the 1970s and Doty was deeply involved in two initiatives: The Dartmouth Conference and the National Academy of Sciences Committee on International Security and Arms Control (CISAC). The Dartmouth Conference aimed to bring leading citizens of the two countries together to discuss matters of potential conflict and economic cooperation. Doty served on the Executive Committee and as chair of its Arms Control Task Force. The CISAC held separate meetings involving congressional, political, and military leaders as well as non-governmental specialists. These efforts are credited with contributing to the lowering of Cold War tensions and to the development of personal contacts among persons who would later become important officials, such as Brent Scowcroft (National Security Advisor under Presidents Gerald Ford (1975-1977) and George H.W. Bush (1989-1993)), Cyrus Vance (American Secretary of State from 1970 to 1980), as well as the Prime Minister of Russia Yevgeny Primakov (1998-1999). In the 1980s, the Committee on International Security and Arms Control met with its counterpart group the Soviet Academy of Sciences to focus on the technical aspects of nuclear arms control; published several reports on U.S. weapons policy and the U.S.-Soviet nuclear security relationship; and began sessions with Chinese scientists and military officers. Doty remained a CISAC member until April 1999.

Doty married Margaretta E. Grevatt (born 1919) in 1942. The couple had one son, Gordon Sutherland (born 1948), and divorced in 1953. Doty married Helga Boedtker (1924-2001) in 1954. They had three daughters: Marcia (born 1956), Rebecca (born 1959), and Katherine (born 1962). Helga Doty was a molecular biologist at Harvard University for more than 30 years. Doty died at his home on December 5, 2011.

The organizations in which Doty was involved were all active concurrently, with overlapping membership and spheres of interest. Information, policies, and recommendations were shared among the groups and each group shaped the others. Content within individual documents confirms that, for instance, discussions Doty was having in 1971 and 1972 in meetings in Moscow sponsored by the AAAS were informed by talks that took place at the Pugwash meetings in those same years.

Some background information about these organizations may help to clarify the complex connections among them.