Harvey Brooks; teacher melded worlds of physics, public policy
Bedridden with the measles as a child, Harvey Brooks started a journal. Unlike most adolescents who keep diaries, the precocious boy carefully charted daily weather patterns. Fascinated by his early research, the 12-year-old decided he wanted to be a physicist.
Dr. Brooks, an academic pioneer in the merger of science and public policy and a distinguished Harvard professor for more than three decades, died Friday in his Brewster Street home in Cambridge from complications of congestive heart failure. He was 88.
"He was at the absolute acme in the profession," said Eugene Skolnikoff, a professor emeritus at MIT who worked closely with Dr. Brooks. "He was a scholar not in the abstract, ivory tower way, but in that he really wanted to understand how things worked."
A native of Cleveland, Dr. Brooks attended Yale University, where he majored in mathematics and took physics courses. He graduated in 1937 and traveled to the University of Cambridge in England to begin doctoral work, which he finished at Harvard University in 1940 under the direction of acclaimed physicist J. H. van Vleck.
At the outset of World War II, Dr. Brooks began consulting at the Harvard Underwater Sound Laboratories in a secret project commissioned by the government and devoted to antisubmarine warfare. He helped design an acoustic homing torpedo known as "Fido," which the military used during the last year of fighting. According to his daughter Rosalind Stowe, he frequently smuggled top-secret electronic information aboard flights to Florida, where the group tested its prototypes. It was also at Harvard that he met his wife, Helen (Lathrop), an executive secretary at the lab.
When the war ended, Dr. Brooks spent four years with
Named dean of Harvard's division of engineering and applied physics in 1957, Dr. Brooks began devoting his expertise to a range of scientific committees and organizations that fused science and public policy. This included a tenure with the President's Science Advisory Committee, a group of the nation's elite science minds. He served the panel under the Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations.
"At the time, they were very powerful because there was nothing quite like it," said Skolnikoff. "All their influence was through the president."
Dr. Brooks served as a member of the National Science Board, chaired committees for the National Academy of Sciences and the National Research Council, and was president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences -- all contributions that cemented his role as an effective middleman between government and the scientific community. The work led to the 1976 creation of the Science, Technology and Public Policy program at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. Dr. Brooks directed the program until his retirement in 1986.
"There's a struggle between the viewpoint that science is a tool to be exploited for the government's benefit and that government should fund science for the creation of knowledge," said Lewis Branscomb, Dr. Brooks's successor at the Kennedy School program. "Harvey was a very deep thinker in that debate. He's clearly the most distinguished scholar in the area."
Dr. Brooks wrote extensively on the subject and earned a reputation for providing voluminous notes on the student and colleague work that he reviewed. According to Branscomb, if a scientist had trouble finishing a paper, often Dr. Brooks would come to the rescue. "They would write something out very casually and he would send back eight pages of notes with footnotes," Branscomb said of the meticulous attention. "You'd sign your name and publish it."
Despite lacking a sense of rhythm, his family recalled, Dr. Brooks loved music and diligently studied music theory. During the summers, he enjoyed spending time with his five children at a family home in rural Ripton, Vt., where he hiked and monitored the weather.
In addition to his daughter and wife, he leaves two other daughters, Alice Bourgoin, of Ferrisburg, Vt., and Katharine Brooks, of Boone, N.C.; a son, Kingsley of Fairfield, Iowa; and two grandchildren.
A memorial service will be held at Harvard in the fall. 