Harvey J. Alter

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Harvey J. Alter, 2006

Harvey James Alter (born September 12, 1935 in New York City ) is an American virologist and transfusion specialist .

Life

Alter was born as the only son of second generation Jewish emigrants. He earned a bachelor's degree from Rochester University in 1956 and an MD in 1960 with a medical degree. After working as a resident at Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester , New York , Alter joined the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda , Maryland as a research assistant in 1961   . From 1964 to 1966 he completed his training as a transfusion medicine specialist (Pathology-Subspecialty Blood Banking) at Georgetown University Hospital in Washington, DC He went through numerous career stages in both institutions and most recently worked as research director of the blood bank at the Clinical Center of the NIH in Bethesda and as professor of internal medicine at Georgetown University. In 1965 he married Barbara, née Bailey, whom he had met during his fellowship at the NIH. They have two sons: Mark, also a medical researcher, and Stacey, a teacher in Colorado. In 1977 they got divorced. In 1984 he married his second wife, Diane, née Dowling, a co-worker who brought two daughters, Lydia Rodin and Erinn Torres, into the marriage. He now has nine grandchildren.

Act

In 1964, together with the future Nobel Prize winner Baruch Blumberg , Alter discovered the Australia Antigen , which later turned out to be a component of the hepatitis B virus .

Alter set up a bank with samples from blood donors in order to be able to examine the samples for infectious agents - depending on the possible later illnesses of the recipient. Based on his research results, blood transfusions could be made significantly safer. On the one hand, blood tests were developed to identify pathogens in donor blood; on the other hand, questionnaires were used to identify many risk carriers among the donors. While at the beginning of the 1970s almost every third blood transfusion led to hepatitis A , hepatitis B or non-A-non-B hepatitis (today mostly identifiable as hepatitis C ), there have been almost no transfusion-related new diseases since 2000.

For the first time, Alter was able to transmit the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) to chimpanzees and thus establish an animal model for research into the disease. He belongs to both the working group that identified the " hepatitis G " virus and the group that was able to show that the virus does not cause hepatitis .

More recent works by Alters deal with other pathogens that can be transmitted by blood transfusion, such as human cytomegalovirus , parvovirus B19 and West Nile virus, and with possible vaccines against the hepatitis C virus .

For the discovery of the hepatitis C virus, Alter 2020 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine together with Michael Houghton and Charles M. Rice . "Thanks to the discoveries made by the three award winners, hepatitis C can now be cured," said the Nobel Prize Committee. "The three scientists found the cause of chronic hepatitis cases and enabled blood tests and new drugs that would have saved millions of lives."

Awards (selection)

Web links

Commons : Harvey J. Alter  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Prestigious Lasker Award for 2000 honors age , NIH Clinical Center News , October 2000 (nih.gov); Retrieved March 20, 2013
  2. ↑ Harvey J. Alter: The road not taken or how I learned to love the liver: A personal perspective on hepatitis history . In: Hepatology . 59, No. 1, 2014, pp. 4–12. doi : 10.1002 / hep.26787 . PMID 24123147 .
  3. ^ The NIH Almanac at the National Institutes of Health (nih.gov); Retrieved March 20, 2013
  4. ^ The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2020 . In: nobelprize.org, October 5, 2020).
  5. ↑ Nobel Prize in Medicine goes to discoverer of the hepatitis C virus , Der Spiegel, October 5, 2020. Retrieved October 6, 2020.
  6. ^ List of Past AABB Award Recipients. In: aabb.org. Retrieved February 20, 2016 .
  7. ^ Albert Lasker Clinical Medical Research Award 2000 Winners at the Lasker Foundation (laskerfoundation.org); Retrieved March 20, 2013
  8. ↑ Harvey J. Alter at the National Academy of Sciences (nasonline.org); Retrieved March 20, 2013
  9. ↑ Harvey J. Alter. In: gairdner.org. Accessed April 14, 2018 .
personal data
SURNAME Alter, Harvey J.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Alter, Harvey James (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American virologist and transfusion specialist
DATE OF BIRTH September 12, 1935
PLACE OF BIRTH New York City