Dr. Hyatt made a tremendous impact on medicine as a physician, educator, and administrator, serving as a professor at Harvard Medical School, dean of the School of Public Health, and senior physician at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.
His research career also included a stint at the Institut Pasteur in Paris in the early 1960s, where he collaborated with future Nobel laureates on the identification of messenger RNA, a discovery that was shared by Pfizer-BioNTech. and helped lay the groundwork for Moderna's coronavirus vaccine.
In the 1940s, Dr. Hyatt was deeply aware of the inequities in health care access when he was nearly denied admission to Harvard University because of quotas that limited the number of Jewish students. From 1963 until 1972, he was an attending physician at Beth Israel Hospital (now Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center) in Boston, where he developed a program to provide medical care to underserved communities in the city. Did.
In 1972, he was appointed dean of the Harvard School of Public Health (now the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health). He told the Harvard Crimson that he has no background in public health, but that the field needs new perspectives.
“For many years, priorities have been skewed in the medical field,” Dr. Hyatt said, adding that he hopes medical professionals will shift their focus from “therapeutic prevention” to prevention.
Over the next 12 years, he nearly doubled the school's endowment. To expand the school's portfolio beyond traditional public health issues, he adopted a multidisciplinary approach. He established the Center for Analysis of Medical Practice, strengthened statistical science, and established the Department of Health Policy and Management.
“He was meticulous and thought through what he wanted to accomplish,” said Alfred Sommer, dean emeritus of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Dr. Hyatt also worked with many public health experts, including Donald Berwick, future administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and Harvey Feinberg, his successor as dean of the School of Public Health at Harvard University. was also adopted.
Around 1980, Dr. Hyatt began to turn his attention to what he called the “last plague” threatening the world: the nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union. Along with other eminent scientists and doctors, he is a member of a special commission convened by Pope John Paul II to study the effects of nuclear threats on humanity and to inform world leaders about the findings. served as
When committee members visited the White House in December 1981, Dr. Hyatt told President Ronald Reagan that a 1-megaton bomb had been detonated in Washington, and that the medical center where the president had been receiving treatment after an assassination attempt. I asked them to imagine destroying the George Washington University Hospital. march.
“I tried to customize it for the president,” Dr. Hyatt told The New York Times. “I told him that there would be 800,000 people in shock from burns and radiation. …Given these facts, people who talk about winning and surviving a nuclear war are saying that they are I don’t understand what you’re saying.”
In a 1982 commentary published in the New England Journal of Medicine, he criticized the Reagan administration's five-year plan to spend $1.6 trillion on national defense. Dr. Hyatt said cuts to essential biological, behavioral, and health services (including what he called deep cuts to the federal child nutrition program) are “negatively impacting the health of our generation and future generations.” He argued that doctors have a responsibility to speak out. It goes against the grain.
Dr. Hyatt resigned as dean in 1984 and joined Brigham and Women's Hospital as a senior physician the following year. He had been a professor of medicine at the same hospital since 1972.
He co-founded the hospital's global health equity department, and in 2004 the hospital established a global health equity and internal medicine residency named after Dr. Hyatt and his wife, Doris.
“Throughout his professional career, Howard Hyatt brought a compassionate and innovative approach to health and medicine,” Institute of Medicine President Feinberg said at a 2007 ceremony honoring Dr. Hyatt. Ta. “He introduced fresh analytical methods to medical and public health education and promoted interdisciplinary approaches to complex health problems. [and] We have trained a new generation of socially responsible doctors. ”
The eldest of three children, Howard Heim Hyatt was born on July 22, 1925 in Patchogue, New York, and raised in Worcester, Massachusetts. His last name was changed from Chaitowitz to Hyatt, after his father, a Lithuanian immigrant. He ran a small shoe company and landed alone on Ellis Island in his teens. His mother was a housewife.
Dr. Hyatt said he felt a calling to medicine when he was 12 years old, when his mother nearly died of hemorrhage after surgery at Harvard University Teaching Hospital.
“I remember feeling so grateful to the surgeons who took care of her and watched over her surgery and subsequent recovery. That's why I decided this was my model,” he wrote in a 2006 Web site. He recalled this in a video interview with of Stories. Online his archive chronicling the lives of famous scientists and other notable figures.
Years later, when he accessed Harvard Medical School's hospital records, he learned that his mother's surgery was not necessary. Her bleeding was due to an undiagnosed medical condition.
Dr. Hyatt was valedictorian of his Worcester high school, but was initially denied admission to Harvard University due to Jewish quotas in place at the time. After the principal protested to the admissions director, Dr. Hyatt admitted him to Harvard in 1944, and a wartime acceleration program allowed him to graduate from Harvard Medical School in 1948 without earning a bachelor's degree.
Early in his career, Dr. Hyatt worked at the National Institutes of Health and in 1960 joined the laboratory of Bernard Horecker, a prominent biochemist who helped him secure a research position at the Pasteur Institute.
In the midst of scientific exploration initiated by James Watson and Francis Crick's 1953 discovery of the structure of DNA, Dr. Hyatt collaborated with Jacques Monod and other Pasteur colleagues to discover messenger RNA, or the genetic code, or genes. We have identified a molecule in cells that conveys the instructions for producing . protein.
In addition to co-authoring a landmark paper on messenger RNA in Nature, Dr. Hyatt was one of the first scientists to identify messenger RNA in mammalian cells. In 1965, Monod was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine along with his Pasteur Institute colleagues François Jacob and André Lewoff for their research into gene regulation.
Dr. Hyatt was married to the former Doris Bierlinger from 1947 until her death in 2007. His son, Fred Hiatt, who was an editorial page editor at the Washington Post, died in 2021. Survivors include two children, Deborah Hiatt and John Hiatt; eight grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.
Dr. Hyatt is a former executive director of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, where he directed its children's initiatives program. He contributed to A Measure of Malpractice (1993), a comprehensive survey of the medical malpractice system.
Throughout his career, Dr. Hyatt never forgot the mentors who helped him. Their photo hung on the wall of his office next to photos of his grandchildren.
He admitted that he had not heard of Holrecker when he arrived at the NIH. “But when I visited his lab, he opened my eyes to what science meant and what science was all about,” Dr. Hyatt said in Boston in 2013.・Told the Globe. myself. “
