Harvey Alter

National Institutes of Health

Harvey J. Alter spent his entire career inside the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center, where as chief of the infectious-disease section and associate director for research of the Department of Transfusion Medicine he turned the safety of the nation's blood supply into a rigorous experimental science. During the mid-1970s Alter's team established that the overwhelming majority of hepatitis cases appearing after blood transfusion could not be blamed on either the hepatitis A or the hepatitis B agent; using carefully controlled inoculation experiments in chimpanzees, they showed an unknown filterable agent he named 'non-A, non-B hepatitis' was the true culprit and behaved like a virus. That painstaking transfusion-epidemiology groundwork is what allowed Chiron researchers to clone the hepatitis C virus in 1988, and it justified the donor-blood screening programs that slashed transfusion-transmitted infection around the globe. Alter took a one-third share of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Michael Houghton and Charles M. Rice, capping earlier recognition that includes the 1992 Karl Landsteiner Memorial Award, the 2000 Lasker Award and the 2013 Gairdner Foundation International Award. Because he effectively wrote the rulebook for blood-bank safety, his name carries weight with vendors of serological screening assays, nucleic-acid donor testing platforms and transfusion-medicine laboratory equipment.