NEW YORK (AP) – Dr. Vincent P. Dole, whose groundbreaking research in the 1960s established that methadone could be used to treat heroin addiction, died Tuesday at a hospital in Manhattan. He was 93.

Dole had suffered from complications of a ruptured aorta, members of his family said.

A longtime resident of Manhattan and clinician at The Rockefeller University, Dole studied a wide range of human biological processes throughout his career.

In 1964, Dole and research partner Dr. Marie Nyswander experimented with shifting addicts from crippling drugs like heroin and morphine to methadone, a synthetic drug far less damaging to the bodies.

At the time, methadone was known predominantly as a painkiller. First synthesized in the late 1930s, it wasn’t widely used because it was highly addictive.

Dole and Nyswander, however, noted that methadone didn’t disable its users like heroin or morphine.

Methadone satisfied the physical cravings of addiction, but didn’t make users high or subject them to violent mood swings.

Their studies suggested that addicts could be put on “maintenance” doses of methadone – meaning they would remain physically dependent on the drug but be able to conduct otherwise normal lives.

Those findings sparked the creation of hundreds of methadone programs worldwide.

Jules Hirsch, a professor emeritus at Rockefeller who worked with Dole for nearly 50 years, said it also fostered thinking that drug addiction should be treated as a medical problem, rather than a purely moral one.

“His biggest concern was that labeling addiction a criminal problem didn’t solve anything,” Hirsch said. “He was among the first to look at addiction as a disease, and be curious about the molecular, biological phenomenon underneath addiction.”

Nyswander, who became Dole’s second wife, died in 1986.

Born in Chicago in 1913, Dole earned degrees from Stanford and Harvard before joining the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in 1941.

During World War II, he was a lieutenant commander at the Naval Medical Research Unit at The Rockefeller Hospital.

Throughout his career, he was a member of several academic societies and won many awards, including the 1988 Albert Lasker Award for Clinical Research.

Aside from his work with drug addiction, Dole was considered an authority in the study of lipid chemistry, obesity and hypertension. Among his greater achievements was research recognizing the role free fatty acids play in delivering energy through the blood.

Dole retired in 1991.

Methadone’s addictive properties made it a controversial treatment, up to the present day. As recently as 1998, New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani threatened to do away with city-funded methadone maintenance programs in the city where Dole helped invent them, saying patients who abstained from all drugs were better off.

Hirsch said Dole was always surprised at how methadone persisted as a political issue.

“I think he was sort of perplexed by it, because he saw some of the plain logic of helping people in distress,” Hirsch said.

Dole is survived by his wife, Margaret Dole; his sons Vincent, of Washington D.C., and Bruce, of St. Louis, Mo.; his daughter Susan, of Arlington, Va.; his stepchildren John Cool, of Pelham, Ellen Cool Kwait, of Marblehead, Mass., Mary Lee Cool Gupta, of New York, and Adrienne Cool, of Oakland, Calif.; thirteen grandchildren and one great grandchild.