Hiatt, Howard H.

Howard Haym Hiatt (July 22, 1925 – March 2, 2024) was an American medical researcher involved with the discovery of messenger RNA. He was the onetime chair of the department of medicine at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston from 1963 to 1972. He was dean of the Harvard School of Public Health from 1972 to 1984. He was co-founder and associate chief of the Division of Social Medicine and Health Inequalities at the Brigham and Women's Hospital, and was also the Associate Chief of the hospital's Division of Global Health Equity. He was a founding head of the cancer division of Beth Israel Hospital (now Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center). He was a member of the team at the Pasteur Institute, Paris, led by François 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 was a member of the Board of Sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.