President's Award

Harvey J. Alter, M.D.

This year’s recipient of the President’s Award from the Society for the Advancement of Blood Management is Dr. Harvey Alter, Chief of the Infectious Disease Section and Associate Director for Research in the Department of Transfusion Medicine at the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland. Dr. Alter’s contributions to the safety of the blood supply, worldwide, are indisputable. Dr. Alter’s many accomplishments include the fact that he recognized that there was such a clinical entity as non-A, non-B hepatitis. He was the first to demonstrate that this was a transmissible agent and to establish a large animal model for the study of the disease. He collaborated and led a series of studies that defined the natural history of what came to be recognized as hepatitis C and proved its frequent progression to chronic hepatitis and cirrhosis. His work in demonstrating the high risk of paid blood donors was instrumental in influencing a national blood policy that adopted an all-volunteer donor supply and subsequently mandated testing of hepatitis B surface antigen and surrogate assay screening. He initiated a series of unique prospective studies that documented the progressive decline of transfusion-associated hepatitis from approximately 33% in the 1960s to near zero by 1997. His team performed the clinical and animal studies that helped lay the foundation for the cloning of the hepatitis C virus, work that subsequently led to highly specific testing for this virus in blood donors.

For these and other studies and contributions, Dr. Alter has received well-deserved recognition. He was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, and Landsteiner Award of the American Association of Blood Banks, the highest awards conferred by these organizations. For his cumulative research accomplishments and the impact of his work on public safety and the blood supply, Dr. Alter was elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences and to the National Academy of Sciences, itself, in 2002. In the year 2000, he was the recipient of the Lasker Award for Clinical Research.

It is SABM’s honor to present the fifth President’s Award to Dr. Alter at the Annual Meeting.