Howard Hiatt

Howard Haym Hiatt is a medical researcher involved with the discovery of messenger RNA, past chair from 1963-1972 of the department of medicine at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, past dean from 1972–1984 of the Harvard School of Public Health, and co-founder and associate chief of the Division of Social Medicine and Health Inequalities at the Brigham and Women's Hospital, where he also helped to launch and for this past decade has been the Associate Chief of the hospital's Division of Global Health Equity, and a founding head of the cancer division of Beth Israel Hospital. He 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. Hiatt was married for 60 years to Doris Bieringer, a librarian who co-founded a reference publication for high school libraries. Hiatt is a member of the Board of Sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.