Dr. David Hamburg, Leader in Conflict Resolution, Dies at 93

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/23/obituaries/dr-david-hamburg-dead.html

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Dr. David A. Hamburg, a behavioral scientist with a broad public profile who got to test his theories on conflict resolution with Soviet leaders during the Cold War and in negotiations with African guerrillas holding his students hostage, died on Sunday in Washington. He was 93.

The cause was ischemic colitis, said his daughter, Dr. Margaret Hamburg, the chairwoman of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration.

In a sweeping career trajectory, Dr. Hamburg advanced biological and genetic research into the causes of aggression and violence as a psychiatrist, taught at major universities, championed the sciences as the leader of two major professional organizations and, as president of one of the world’s most well-endowed foundations, was able to jump-start many of the programs and policies that until then he had been able only to espouse.

Dr. Hamburg’s résumé included appointments as president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York from 1982 to 1997; president of the National Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Medicine from 1975 to 1980; and president and chairman of the American Association for the Advancement of Science from 1984 to 1986.

A prolific author, Dr. Hamburg was also a professor and chairman of the psychiatry department at Stanford University from 1961 to 1972 and the John D. MacArthur professor of health at Harvard University from 1980 to 1983. After he left Carnegie, he and his wife, Dr. Beatrix Hamburg, a noted researcher in child development and psychology, were DeWitt Wallace distinguished scholars at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York.

In 1996, Dr. Hamburg was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award, by President Bill Clinton for his contributions to world peace and public health.

Dr. Hamburg’s commitment to medicine began when, barely a teenager, he was captivated by an exhibit about appendectomies at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. (He had lost a 14-year-old cousin to appendicitis.) Teachers later instilled in him a fascination with the biology and genetics of aggression, stress and conflict.

His own family had known such moments of emotional and mental strain.

“I grew up in the shadow of the Holocaust,” he said in a 2008 Stanford interview.

His Jewish paternal grandfather had fled pogroms in Latvia and immigrated to the United States, arriving in New York and later settling in Indiana as a pushcart peddler. He helped bring some 50 relatives to the United States from Eastern Europe before the Germans began the wholesale extermination of Jews, a horror that Dr. Hamburg said his grandfather could not imagine originating in such a cultured country.

Dr. Hamburg’s family history helped shape his thinking about the human capacity for barbarity.

“I guess I felt at some stage that if it could happen in Germany, it could happen anywhere,” he said in a 1998 interview for a Carnegie Corporation oral history project at Columbia University.

Conducting some of his research with his wife, Dr. Hamburg explored how human beings reconciled an instinctive wariness of unfamiliar people with their equally instinctive need to cooperate as a group in order to survive.

He had to come to grips with that conflict personally in 1975 after three of his Stanford graduate students and a Dutch colleague, who were conducting research in Tanzania on the biology of aggression, were abducted by militants from neighboring Zaire (now known as the Democratic Republic of Congo), and held for ransom.

In an episode that drew considerable publicity, Dr. Hamburg flew to Africa, where, after 10 weeks of negotiations, the hostages were released. (Their captors had demanded $500,000 but reportedly accepted $40,000, in a settlement that has remained secret.)

“I had been immersed in the worst problems of the world during those few months — of disease and abject poverty and ignorance and deception and violence,” he said in the Columbia oral history interview.

The experience made him “reconsider what I wanted to do with the rest of my life,” he later told the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, “and whether there would be some possibility of engaging with the policy issues that brought about that hatred and violence and ignorance and disease and severe poverty.”

In the mid-1980s, Dr. Hamburg, along with arms control experts in academia and government and congressional leaders, met periodically with their Soviet counterparts on ways to reduce the risk of nuclear war.

Toward the end of the decade, he recalled, he told Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the last president of the Soviet Union, that at the rate disarmament talks were going, “I think the Cold War might just be over by the year 2000.”

“Well, you know, a year later,” he added, “depending on what criteria you use, one or two years later, it was all over.”

David Allen Hamburg was born on Oct. 1, 1925, in Evansville, Ind., to Samuel and Beryl (Becker) Hamburg. His father, who immigrated from Latvia with his family as a child, had wanted to become a doctor but wound up working in the family’s dry goods store. His mother, a homemaker, was a daughter of Eastern European parents and had been raised in Ireland until she was 14.

David Hamburg earned his bachelor’s degree in 1944 and his medical degree in 1947 from Indiana University — while simultaneously training as an Army medic — and completed his residency at Yale, where he met Beatrix McCleary, the first self-identifying black woman to graduate from Vassar College and the first to graduate from Yale’s medical school.

She died last year. In addition to his daughter, Margaret, who is also a former New York City health commissioner, he is survived by his son, Eric, a public interest lawyer, writer and film producer, and three grandchildren.

Dr. Hamburg was the author of “Today’s Children: Creating a Future for a Generation in Crisis” (1992); “No More Killing Fields: Preventing Deadly Conflict” (2002); “Learning to Live Together: Preventing Hatred and Violence in Child and Adolescent Development” (2004); “Preventing Genocide: Practical Steps toward Early Detection and Effective Action” (2008); “Give Peace a Chance: Preventing Mass Violence” (2013), written with Eric Hamburg; and “A Model of Prevention: Life Lessons” (2015).

He was an emeritus member of the board of trustees of the Carter Center, former President Jimmy Carter’s humanitarian organization in Atlanta. In a statement on Monday, Mr. Carter praised Dr. Hamburg as “a man who dedicated his great heart and mind to understanding the roots of injustice and violence so that we might prevent them.”

At Carnegie, where he was succeeded by Vartan Gregorian, the former president of Brown University and the New York Public Library, Dr. Hamburg focused on early-childhood and adolescent health and education, as well as training teachers and preventing conflict, including terrorism.

“The subject of violence is old wine,” he said in an interview with The New York Times in 1985. “The new bottle is the technology enabling the contagion to spread easily, such as the notion of spitting in the eye of the most powerful nation in the world.”

The challenge for humankind, he said, is to maintain identification with supportive small groups while also accepting global interdependence — even though, he added, “there’s hardly anything in our background as a species to prepare for identifying with the whole big wide world.”