Harvey J. Alter

Harvey J. Alter (born September 12, 1935) is an American physician, medical researcher, and virologist renowned for his pioneering work on blood-borne viruses, particularly his contributions to identifying the Hepatitis C virus (HCV), for which he shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Michael Houghton and Charles M. Rice. Alter's research demonstrated the existence of a previously unknown agent causing non-A, non-B hepatitis in transfusion recipients, laying the groundwork for the virus's identification and the development of screening tests that have dramatically reduced transmission through blood products worldwide.

Born in New York City to Jewish parents and raised in the Ridgewood neighborhood of Queens, Alter initially aspired to a career in baseball before pursuing medicine, earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1956 and a Doctor of Medicine degree in 1960 from the University of Rochester. He completed residency training in internal medicine at Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester and Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York, followed by service as a clinical associate in the Immunology Branch of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) from 1964 to 1966. After serving in the U.S. Army Medical Corps from 1966 to 1968, Alter returned to the NIH in 1969 as a senior investigator in the NCI's Immunology Section, where he began studying transfusion-associated hepatitis. In 1974, he joined the Clinical Center's Blood Bank (now the Department of Transfusion Medicine), becoming chief of its Infectious Diseases Section in 1983 and later a senior scholar in transfusion medicine.

Harvey J. Alter was born on September 12, 1935, in New York City, to a Jewish family whose parents were first-generation Americans of Eastern European descent, with grandparents who had emigrated from Western Russia and Poland.

His father, who had aspired to a career in medicine but became a salesman to support the family, fostered an early interest in science by regularly reading publications like Science Digest, while his mother, raised in poverty after her own father's early death and later becoming a homemaker, instilled a sense of resilience shaped by her immigrant family's struggles with health and hardship. The family lived a modest, working-class life in Ridgewood, Queens, where Alter grew up as the only son, with expectations from his Jewish upbringing in New York City that he would pursue medicine.

Harvey J. Alter was born to a Jewish family of first-generation Americans, with his father originating from Western Russia and his mother from Poland.