A chemist for the U.S. Justice Department, Shubin worked in the department’s R&D lab, the National Institute for Justice. Shortly after arriving there in 1971, a colleague told Shubin of a new fabric that DuPont had invented to replace steel belts in tires. Shubin and the colleague, Nicholas Montanarelli, who worked for the Army’s Land Warfare Laboratory at the Aberdeen Proving Ground, got some samples, then grabbed several pistols and went to the firing range. “We folded it over a couple of times and shot at it,” Shubin said later. “The bullets didn’t go through.”
They realized the fabric — Kevlar — could be used to make “bulletproof” vests for police officers that were lightweight and flexible enough to wear constantly, not just when trouble was expected, and Shubin got $5 million in funding to develop and make some. He had 500 made and gave them out to police departments for testing, but most cops wouldn’t wear them — until a Seattle officer who was wearing one was shot when he walked in on a robbery, and lived.
Manufacturers still didn’t want to make vests, though, since they thought they’d be sued if a vest failed. “That was almost a bigger problem than developing the body armor,” said Montanarelli, who continued to work with Shubin on developing the vests. That was overcome by developing federal standards for Kevlar-based vests, and now most cops wear them most of the time. Shubin was also an early proponent of using dogs in police work to find explosives. “We learned that basically any dog could find explosives or drugs,” he once said, “even very small dogs like Chihuahuas, whose size could be an advantage [and] could smell a bomb as well as a German shepherd.” Shubin died November 20 from a heart attack. He was 84.
See Also: Stephanie Kwolek