Howard Haym Hiatt was born on July 22, 1925, in Patchogue, N.Y., on Long Island, to Alexander and Dorothy (Askinas) Hiatt. His father had immigrated from Lithuania by himself at 15. The family, its name changed from Chaitowicz to Hiatt, moved to Worcester, Mass., where Alexander Hiatt ran a small shoe company.
Howard was his high school valedictorian, but he was initially denied admission to Harvard; there was, he recalled later in life, a quota on the number of Jews that could be accepted at the time. After his high school principal protested to the dean of admissions, he was allowed to enroll in 1944. He entered Harvard Medical School two years later.
While there, he met Doris Bieringer, a student at Wellesley College; the couple married in 1948, the year Dr. Hiatt received his M.D. Mrs. Hiatt studied library science and was a founder of a magazine that reviewed books for school libraries. She died in 2007.
In the mid-1950s, Dr. Hiatt was a researcher at the National Institutes of Health. That job led to a one-year lab position in 1960 at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, then a center of the exciting new field of molecular biology.
In Paris, he worked under Jacques Monod and François Jacob, the future Nobel Prize winners who first named and described messenger RNA, a molecule that transfers genetic codes to make proteins. It was messenger RNA that was the foundation of the first Covid-19 vaccines approved for use in the U.S., 60 years later.
Kaynak: briturkish.com
