My cousin Graham Pearson, who has died aged 88, was a research chemist and then a senior civil servant in the Ministry of Defence, serving from 1984 until 1995 as director general of what is now the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory at Porton Down in Wiltshire.
Arising from a growing interest in arms control, which led him while still in post to work on verification methods to enforce the Biological Weapons Convention, in 1996 he joined Bradford University’s Department of Peace Studies as an honorary visiting research fellow in international security. His skills as an organiser, analyser and writer, helped by his boundless energy and genial personality, involved him in numerous meetings designed to strengthen the BWC, including in Geneva during Pugwash conferences on science and world affairs. He published widely in the field of chemical and biological weapons. Subsequently a visiting professor, he was made a DUniv of Bradford in 2018.
