With a Ph.D. in sociology and statistics from Columbia, Beebe spent World War II with the Office of the Surgeon General of the Army. After the war, he directed the Medical Follow-up Agency at the National Academy of Sciences, which followed 15 million servicemen to see the correlation, if any, between military service and disease.
“Dr. Beebe wrote flawless protocols for the scientific design of large-scale medical studies,” said Dr. Robert W. Miller of the National Cancer Institute. As an expert on radiation, Beebe also set up medical studies of more than a quarter million survivors of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and found that young girls, especially, were at greater risk of developing cancer from radiation. He later applied his expertise to study 88,000 cleanup workers and nearby residents after the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident. Beebe died March 3 in Washington, D.C. He was 90.