Richard Havel, a renowned medical researcher and elected member of the National Academy of Sciences who lived in Greenbrae and Inverness, died last month. He was 91 years old.
Richard was outgoing but modest, and his passions stretched from the research lab to the natural world, particularly to birds and mushrooms—though it was his investigation into lipoproteins that won him accolades. “He loved his field and his research,” said colleague and Inverness neighbor Lloyd Smith.
Born in 1925, Richard grew up in Seattle, the son of a newspaperman and a homemaker. Though as a child he dreamed of being a forest ranger, he majored in biology at Reed College, in Portland. There he met his future wife, Virginia (who went by Gini). The two married in 1945.
Richard’s studies continued at the University of Oregon, where he earned both a medical degree and a master’s in chemistry in 1949. From there he hopped to the East Coast for a residency at Cornell University’s Medical Center in New York City, where he specialized in internal medicine.
He then worked at the National Heart Institute of the Public Health Service in Maryland (which is now The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Heath). There, in the 1950s, he and others conducted research in the lipoproteins, a nascent field at the time. Today, lay people are probably most familiar with lipoproteins in the form of LDL or HDL, which are often called “bad cholesterol” and “good cholesterol,” respectively. A paper he wrote while at the institute, which explains his invention of a new process to separate certain kinds of lipoproteins, was a landmark study in the field and has been cited hundreds of times in subsequent research.
The ability to isolate these lipoproteins laid the groundwork for research into their connection with heart disease. Richard continued research in the lipoproteins throughout his career and has been called one of the fathers of lipoprotein research.
He returned to the West Coast in 1956, joining the University of San Francisco and becoming the director of the university’s Cardiovascular Research Institute in 1972. At the university, he published hundreds of papers, including an early study on the connection between LDL cholesterol and heart disease. “He did groundbreaking research into [that] connection,” said his son Peter, who added that Richard “was very modest about it.”
He taught in Stockholm and Australia during sabbaticals and, in 1983, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. An annual conference on lipids even has an event named after him: the Havel Lecture.
He and Gini raised their four children in Ross. Three of them followed in their parents’ scientific footsteps in various ways (Gini was was a botany and biology instructor at the College of Marin for some years). Peter is a professor at the University of California, Davis, in the Department of Nutrition and the School of Veterinary Medicine’s Department of Molecular Biosciences. One of the sons, Chris, works at the University of California, San Francisco, studying cigarette smoke and another son, Tim, studied biophysics and has worked at M.I.T. and Harvard. A sister, Julianne, was perhaps the outlier; in the past, she has run a preschool, and Peter said she is interested in ceramics and photography.
That’s not to say science was Richard’s only passion. He and Gini love the outdoors and they bought land overlooking Tomales Bay in the ‘70s. As avid tennis players, they had some priorities. They built the tennis court first, parking a trailer to sleep in during visits. When that was finished, they built a house, designed by Jim Campe.
Lloyd Smith, a colleague at the University of San Francisco who also has a tennis court on his Inverness property, said they were fierce players. “They were out to beat the hell out of you,” he said.
When Richard retired in the ‘90s, the couple started to enjoy most of their time at their Inverness home—though he continued to conduct research even after his retirement from the cardiovascular
institute.
They had no want of activities in Inverness. They were avid gardeners, and she was a member of the Inverness Garden Club. Peter said they grew a wide variety of fruits and vegetables—berries, lettuces, peas and beans to name a few—and also had trees on their property, including a kiwi tree.
They foraged for mushrooms like chanterelles and porcinis, and owned a little motorboat that they took around the bay. One of their greatest passions was birding. Locally, they participated in the Christmas Bird Count. Yet while Point Reyes is rich in birds—over 400 species have been spotted here—they traveled the world to go birding, including to Indonesia, South America and Cuba, “even when you weren’t supposed to go to Cuba,” Peter said.
Lloyd also recalled that they “took a recent trip to Lesbos just to watch birds.”
For Lloyd, Richard’s research, his tennis game and his birding enthusiasm all traced to a deeper drive. “He never undertook things lightly,” he said. “He wanted to do everything extremely well and thoroughly.”
Richard Havel is survived by his wife, Gini; his children Chris, Tim, Peter and Julianne; his grandchildren Jocelyn, Tyler and Cameron; his niece, Tracy Grant; and his grandniece, Melanie Grant.