American Jewish scientist Harvey J. Alter has won the Nobel Prize for Medicine along with fellow American Charles M. Rice and British-born scientist Michael Houghton for their discovery of the hepatitis C virus, a major source of liver disease that affects millions worldwide.
Announcing the prize in Stockholm, the Nobel Committee notes that the trio’s work identified a major source of blood-borne hepatitis that couldn’t be explained by the previously discovered hepatitis A and B viruses. Their work, dating back to the 1970s and 1980s, has helped saved millions of lives, it says.
Nobel Committee members Patrik Ernfors (L) and Gunilla Karlsson Hedestam sit in front of a screen displaying the winners of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (L-R) American Harvey Alter, Briton Michael Houghton and American Charles Rice during a press conference at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, on October 5, 2020. (Jonathan NACKSTRAND / AFP)
Alter, who was born in 1935 in New York, carried out his prize-winning studies at the US National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, where he remains active, the committee said. Rice, born in 1952 in Sacramento, California, worked on hepatitis at Washington University in St. Louis and now works at Rockefeller University in New York. Houghton, born in Britain in 1950, studied at the Chiron Corporation in California before moving to the University of Alberta in Canada.
“Being the only son of Jewish parents in New York City, it was preordained that I would become a doctor,” Alter wrote in 2013. “One of my friends, of similar background, chose not to be a doctor and has never been heard from again.”
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