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The Havel Lecture

The Havel Lecture was named after Dr. Richard J. Havel (1925–2016), a pioneer in the fields of lipid metabolism, plasma lipoprotein metabolism and cardiovascular disease. Havel, who everyone knew as “Dick,” was frequently called “Mr. Lipoprotein USA” because of his groundbreaking work in characterizing distinct classes of lipoproteins and unraveling mechanisms underlying plasma lipoprotein metabolism. As a clinical associate with Christian Anfinsen at the National Institutes of Health (1953–1956), Dick published landmark papers on plasma lipoprotein metabolism. One of those papers, “The distribution and chemical composition of ultracentrifugally separated lipoproteins in human serum,” published in The Journal of Clinical Investigation in 1955, is one of the most frequently cited papers in biomedical research. In another landmark paper, Dick described lipoprotein lipase deficiency as a cause of familial chylomicronemia; that paper was the first description of an inherited disorder of plasma lipoprotein metabolism.

Dick published over 300 manuscripts. The quality of his publications is reflected by his election to the National Academy of Sciences in 1983, the Institute of Medicine in 1989, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1992. He received many other honors, including the Bristol-Myers Squibb Award for Distinguished Achievement in Nutrition Research and the Distinguished Achievement Award from the American Heart Association’s Council on Arteriosclerosis.

Dick was one of the founders of the Journal of Lipid Research and served as chair of the JLR Advisory Board for many years. From 1973 to 1992, he served as director of UCSF’s Cardiovascular Research Institute, where he trained numerous postdoctoral researchers and mentored junior faculty in biomedical research. Many of Dick’s trainees went on to become outstanding investigators and teachers.

For many years, Dick organized the Deuel Conference on Lipids, which held its first meeting in the mid-1950s. Dick attended the Deuel Conference every year and continued to attend the meeting for more than 20 years after his retirement from UCSF. Dick typically sat in the front row, often rocking forward in his seat, listening intently, and taking notes on each presentation. He asked penetrating questions and was invariably constructive. As a tribute to Dick’s leadership and his extraordinary record of discovery in lipid metabolism, the Deuel Conference on Lipids instituted an annual Richard J. Havel lectureship. The inaugural Havel lecture was delivered by Drs. Michael Brown and Joseph Goldstein (1995 Nobel laureates in Medicine or Physiology) on March 6, 2002. Since then, the Havel Lecture has been the centerpiece of the Deuel Conference on Lipids.