Howard Haym Hiatt, MD, is a medical researcher involved with the discovery of messenger RNA, past dean from 1972-1984 of the Harvard School of Public Health, and co-founder and associate chief of the Division of Social Medicine and Health Inequalities at the Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, where he also he helped to launch and for this past decade has been the Associate Chief of the hospital's Division of Global Health Equity. He was a member of the team at the Pasteur Institute, Paris, which had first identified and described messenger RNA, and he was among the first to demonstrate messenger RNA in mammalian cells (in mice). He was married for 60 years to Doris Bieringer, a librarian who co-founded a reference publication for high school libraries. Dr. Hiatt is a member of the Boa