Harry Charles Kelly (9 October 19082 February 1976) was an American physicist best known for his role in Japan in the aftermath of World War II in preserving scientific research not related to weaponry. He forged enduring relations between the U.S. and Japanese scientific communities, recognized by the Japanese government. Upon his death in 1976, the Japanese government requested a portion of his remains be buried in Japan. He is the subject of a biography, Science has No National Borders: Harry C. Kelly and the Reconstruction of Science and Technology in Postwar Japan, and a documentary broadcast on Japanese television. Early life and career Kelly was the son of a blacksmith for a coal mine and grew up in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, with a brother and two sisters. He earned a B.S. in physics at Lehigh University, and a Ph.D. at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1936. He helped found Baird Associates, a medical engineering firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but experienced a traumatic incident in which he was unable to save his brother from drowning. He subsequently moved to Montana, accepting a position at Montana State University at Bozeman. In Montana he met and married Irene Andes, the daughter of a Montana homesteader; the couple had two sons, Henry and Thomas. Inspired by the goals of the transformed St. John's College, he moved to Annapolis, Maryland, and taught the first physics classes there. With the outbreak of World War II, he returned to MIT, where he became part of the Radiation Laboratory (the "Rad Lab"), which played a key role in developing a practical radar system. After the war Kelly prepared to return to academic life, but instead was recruited as part of the Allied Occupation of Japan, as a science adviser to General Douglas MacArthur. His job was to help the Occupation distinguish between military equipment and civilian university research facilities. Role in postwar Japanese science On November 24, 1945 US soldiers descended on a physics laboratory run by Yoshi Nishina and used dynamite, crowbars and blowtorches to dismantle two operating cyclotrons and sank them in Tokyo Bay. The US National Academy of Sciences and the Association of Oak Ridge Scientists were horrified and insisted that the US Occupation forces find someone who could distinguish civilian science from military equipment. Kelly was chosen and assigned to the Scientific and Technical division of the Occupation's General Headquarters Economic and Scientific Section