Howard Haym Hiatt was an American medical researcher involved with the discovery of messenger RNA.
22 Facts About Howard Hiatt
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Howard Hiatt was the onetime chair of the department of medicine at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston from 1963 to 1972.
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Howard Hiatt was dean of the Harvard School of Public Health from 1972 to 1984.
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Howard Hiatt was co-founder and associate chief of the Division of Social Medicine and Health Inequalities at the Brigham and Women's Hospital, and was the Associate Chief of the hospital's Division of Global Health Equity.
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Howard Hiatt was a founding head of the cancer division of Beth Israel Hospital.
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Howard Hiatt was a member of the team at the Pasteur Institute, Paris, led by Francois Jacob and Jacques Monod, which first identified and described messenger RNA, and he was part of the team led by James Watson that was among the first to demonstrate messenger RNA in mammalian cells.
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Howard Hiatt was a member of the Board of Sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
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Howard Haym Hiatt was born in Patchogue, New York, in 1925 to a Jewish family.
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Howard Hiatt's father was an immigrant from Lithuania who lost much of his family in the Holocaust; he immigrated alone to the United States, where he changed his surname to "Hiatt" from "Chaitowicz" at Ellis Island.
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Howard Hiatt enrolled in Harvard College in 1944, and received his medical degree in 1948 from the Harvard Medical School.
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Howard Hiatt was trained in clinical medicine, biochemistry, and molecular biology.
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Howard Hiatt was a Harvard University faculty member beginning in 1955.
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Howard Hiatt was the first Blumgart Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, as well as the physician-in-chief at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, from 1963 to 1972.
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In 1972, Howard Hiatt was planning to go to Yale as the dean of its medical school, when the then-new president of Harvard University asked him to stay as dean of the Harvard School of Public Health.
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Howard Hiatt helped develop the Research Training in Clinical Effectiveness Program, which trains physicians to carry out research on issues of quality and costs of medical care.
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Howard Hiatt helped launch and for his last ten years was Associate Chief of the Division of Global Health Equity.
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Howard Hiatt was a member of the Board of Directors of Partners in Health and a member emeritus of the Task Force for Global Health.
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Howard Hiatt had numerous research articles in publications such as the Journal of Molecular Biology, Journal of Biological Chemistry, the New England Journal of Medicine, and the Journal of the American Medical Association.
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Howard Hiatt wrote for the lay press in areas of disease prevention, health services, and the health implications of the nuclear arms race.
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Howard Hiatt was married to Doris Bieringer, a librarian who co-founded a reference publication for high-school libraries, from 1947 until her death in 2007.
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Howard Hiatt served as vice-president of the Associated Jewish Philanthropies of Boston, and as a member of a presidential committee.
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Howard Hiatt died from pulmonary hypertension at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on March 2,2024, at the age of 98.