The US scientist and engineer Arthur Kantrowitz had an unusually wideranging career involving aeronautics, space and biomedical engineering.

He flourished in the nation that pioneered the exploration of space, and made a notable contribution to the US’s achievements in aeronautics and space exploration.

His research on extremely hot gases and fluid dynamics, studying the behaviour of liquids and gases in motion, helped the development of many things, ranging from nose cones for rockets and missiles to high- energy lasers and implanted heartassist pumps.

A man of great ingenuity, he suggested the use of laser propulsion — lasers, operated from the ground, to launch payloads into space orbits — and was the co-inventor of magnetically contained nuclear fusion.

Much involved in public policy, he campaigned enthusiastically for the creation of an Institution for Scientific Judgment, known as a “science court”, to resolve scientific controversies and to provide reliable information about what science knows and does not know — information needed by those involved in public policymaking.

His public service included membership of the presidential advisory group on anticipated advances in science and technology in the mid-1970s, during the Administration of President Gerald Ford.

Arthur Robert Kantrowitz was born in 1913 in the Bronx, New York, the eldest of four siblings, three brothers and a sister. His father, Bernard, was a doctor; his mother, Rose, designed costumes for the Ziegfeld Follies. He was educated at the DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx and then went to Columbia University, New York, to study physics. As a boy he had worked with his younger brother Adrian (obituary, Nov 21, 2008), later America’s first heart transplant surgeon, to fashion an electrocardiogram device out of radio spare parts.

He received his bachelor’s degree from Columbia University in 1934 and his master’s degree in physics in 1936. In that year he took a job at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (Naca), the precursor to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Agency (Nasa), at Langley Field in Virginia.

In 1938 he conducted an experiment with Eastman N. Jacobs in an attempt to harness the energy source that powers the Sun (the thermonuclear fusion of hydrogen into helium) by heating hydrogen with radio waves while containing the gas with a magnetic field. They were the first to try to produce a nuclear-fusion reaction in the laboratory.

The experiment failed and their director cancelled the project, much to their dismay. Physicists later took up their idea; they are still trying to make it succeed. Given the virtually unlimited amount of hydrogen available for fuel, a nuclear-fusion reactor could, if it could be made commercially viable, solve the world’s energy problems.

Kantrowitz moved on to conduct research about gas dynamics under the supervision of the celebrated physicist Edward Teller (obituary, Sept 11, 2003). In 1947 he was awarded his PhD by Columbia University.

He left the Naca in 1946 to become a lecturer at Columbia University where he taught for the next ten years. In 1955 he left Columbia University to set up the Avco-Everett Research Laboratory (AERL) in Everett, Massachusetts. Initially, AERL was heavily involved in defence work but in the late 1960s, as military research budgets were going down, it began to explore civilian projects.

Kantrowitz decided that the separation of uranium isotopes, using a laser isotope separation method, was a commercially promising civilian venture. At the time the generation of electricity by nuclear power was projected to increase considerably and uranium enriched in the isotope uranium-235 would be required to fuel nuclear-power reactors.

In 1971 AERL demonstrated the laser enrichment of uranium for the first time and, in 1976, working with Exxon, AERL demonstrated a uranium-enrichment process suitable for large-scale production.

He served as director, senior executive officer and chairman of AERL until 1978 when he was appointed a professor at the Thayer School, Dartmouth College, a small private college in Hanover, New Hampshire.

Kantrowitz was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; the American Association for the Advancement of Science; the American Astronautical Society; the American Physical Society; the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering; and an honorary fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. He was a member of the American National Academy of Engineering; the American National Academy of Sciences; and the International Academy of Astronautics. In 1953-54 he held both Fulbright and Guggenheim fellowships at the universities of Cambridge and Manchester. He was an honorary professor of the Huazhong Institute of Technology, Wuhan, China, and served on the board of advisors for the Foresight Institute, an organisation devoted to preparing for nanotechnology.

Kantrowitz held 21 patents and wrote or co-wrote more than 200 papers and articles in scientific journals and co-authored the book Fundamentals of Gas Dynamics (1958).

A brilliant and innovative man, Kantrowitz never lost his faith in science and technology. He was convinced that human beings have the ability to solve all their problems.

His first marriage ended in divorce. His second wife, Lee Stuart, and three daughters survive him.

Professor Arthur Kantrowitz, scientist and engineer, was born on October 20, 1913. He died on November 29, 2008, aged 95