Harvey J. Alter

Harvey Alter is an American physician and medical researcher, born in New York City in 1935, who spent his career at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center in Bethesda, where he led the infectious diseases section of the Department of Transfusion Medicine. As a young fellow he co-discovered the Australia antigen with Baruch Blumberg, a step toward isolating the hepatitis B virus. In the 1970s his team showed that most hepatitis after blood transfusion was neither type A nor type B, and chimpanzee transmission studies proved a new viral cause, later named hepatitis C, confirmed in 1988. His work led to donor screening that nearly eliminated transfusion hepatitis, and he shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.