“He not only got the data, but then worked tirelessly with the information he had to convince others that prevention was urgent and possible,” said Dr. Cladd Stevens, one of his students and collaborators in Taiwan. “Finally, he convinced officials and his protégés in Taiwan to document the impact of Taiwan’s immunization program on the incidence of liver cancer.”

Dr. Beasley spent nearly 15 years in Taiwan at a time when its relations with the United States were complicated by America’s improving relationship with China, which has long claimed Taiwan as a territory. In 1984, he persuaded Taiwanese public health officials to make the country one of the first to promote infant vaccination for hepatitis B, and his advocacy was crucial when the World Health Organization added hepatitis B to its list of recommended infant vaccinations by the early 1990s.

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“It’s almost like an Albert Schweitzer trying to figure out Africa,” said Dr. Herbert DuPont, the director of the Center for Infectious Diseases at the University of Texas. “It’s a very unusual thing in medicine to see a senior person like Palmer Beasley living and fighting those wars himself.”

In 1987, a year after leaving Taiwan, Dr. Beasley became the dean of the School of Public Health at the University of Texas.

At Texas, Dr. Beasley mentored a new generation of researchers, including many from Vietnam, and he pressed developing countries to establish registries of cancer victims, with the long-term goal of tracking potential causes the way he had in Taiwan. In 2003, he returned to Taiwan as part of a delegation from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to help control the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS.

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“He also urged the World Health Organization to let Taiwan become a member/observer of the organization,” Dr. Chien-Jen Chen, a professor at National Taiwan University, said in an e-mail. “He emphasized that Taiwan should not be left as an orphan in global health.”

Dr. Chen, who did follow-up work showing the success of immunization in preventing liver cancer, said that two people Dr. Beasley mentored in Taiwan had become national health ministers there.

Robert Palmer Beasley was born on April 29, 1936, in Los Angeles. His mother, Bernice Palmer Beasley, lectured on current affairs for many years; his father, Robert Seth Beasley, was a banker.

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After graduating from Dartmouth College, Dr. Beasley received his medical degree from Harvard. He interned at King County Hospital in Seattle before joining the Epidemic Intelligence Service of what would become the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta in 1963. He returned to Seattle in 1965 and joined the University of Washington. He remained affiliated with the university for more than two decades, while spending the bulk of his time in Taiwan.

Besides Dr. Hwang, whom Dr. Palmer met while working in Taiwan and with whom he conducted studies and published several papers on hepatitis B, he is survived by a brother, the sculptor Bruce Beasley; two children, Monica Payson and Fletcher Beasley, from his marriage to Sonia Ann Garon, which ended in divorce; a daughter from his marriage to Dr. Hwang, Bernice Hwang Beasley; and two grandchildren.

Dr. Beasley had hoped to see hepatitis B eradicated in his lifetime. That goal was not achieved.

“Hepatitis B isn’t eradicated, but it is eradicable,” he told The Houston Chronicle in 2000. “What will do that is a long-term, systematic approach across the world. Now it’s my job to get people to start thinking in those terms.”