Howard Haym Hiatt (born July 22, 1925) is a medical researcher involved with the discovery of messenger RNA, past chair from 1963-1972 of the department of medicine at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, 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, 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, and a founding head of the cancer division of Beth Israel Hospital (now Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center). He was a member of the team at the Pasteur Institute, Paris, led by Francois Jacob and Jacques Monod which first identified and described messenger RNA,