Paul Harding Douglas, an AIDS researcher at New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center and co-author of two reference books on the disease, died on Friday at New York Hospital. He was 37 and lived in Manhattan.

The cause was AIDS, said Dr. Michael F. Giordano, a colleague at the medical center.

Even as a youngster, Mr. Douglas was "avid for science books," according to the memoir of his grandfather Paul H. Douglas, who represented Illinois in the United States Senate from 1949 to 1967.

Mr. Douglas received a bachelor's degree from Harvard University in 1981 and two master's degrees in computer science from Columbia, in 1984 and 1985. At Columbia, he was a co-founder of the Gay Health Advocacy Project, with Laura Pinsky.

Mr. Douglas and Ms. Pinsky wrote "The Essential AIDS Fact Book" (Pocket Books), a primer published in 1987 and reissued in 1992. With Craig Metroka, they also wrote "The Essential HIV Treatment Fact Book" (Pocket Books, 1992).

In 1992, Mr. Douglas was appointed a research associate at the AIDS clinical trials unit at Cornell. Two years later, he became executive director of the unit's activities that are supported by the American Foundation for AIDS Research.

He is survived by his companion, Gary Ledet; his parents, Paul Wolff and Colette Smith Douglas, of Manhattan; two sister, Dr. Carolyn Douglas of Manhattan and Christine Douglas Tansey of Bristol, R.I., and a brother, Philip, of Manhattan. (New York Times, Wednesday, August 2, 1995.)

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