Sidney Drell ’47

Noted physicist and arms-control expert Sidney Drell died Dec. 21, 2016, in Palo Alto, Calif., at the age of 90.

Sidney was born in Atlantic City, N.J., where his father was a pharmacist and his mother was a schoolteacher. Both parents were Jewish immigrants from the Russian empire.

Sidney entered Princeton in 1943, and a ruptured appendix and peritonitis disqualified him from military service. He graduated from Princeton in 1946 and then attended the University of Illinois, where he earned a master’s degree in physics and then a Ph.D. in 1949. He was on the faculty at both MIT and Stanford, settling permanently at Stanford in 1956. For many years he was a major contributor to the work at the Stanford Linear Accelerator, where his specialties were quantum electrodynamics and quantum chromodynamics. He was the recipient of the prestigious MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” for advances in particle physics and quantum theory.

In his own view, his most important work was “working to avoid the nightmare of nuclear holocaust,” as a writer and adviser to military and intelligence leaders and an internationally prominent advocate of limits on nuclear weapons. He was co-director of the Stanford Center for International Security and Cooperation, which proposed solutions to worldwide problems through science, diplomacy, and economics. In 2006, Sidney teamed with former Secretary of State George P. Shultz ’42 to start Stanford’s program to free the world of nuclear weapons. They published several books together.

Sidney is survived by his wife of 64 years, Harriet Stainback Drell; son Daniel; daughters Persis and Joanna; and three grandchildren. The class proudly sends its memories of this outstanding scholar and world leader to his family.