Two Faculty Receive Heinz Awards

The widow of the heir to the Heinz ketchup fortune and wife of presidential candidate Sen. John F. Kerry, D-Mass., is sharing some of her wealth with two of Harvard’s top professors.

In a press conference yesterday, Teresa Heinz announced that Professor of Medical Anthropology Paul E. Farmer and Yamaguchi Professor of Environmental Health and Human Habitation John D. “Jack” Spengler will be among six national recipients of the ninth annual Heinz Award.

Heinz established the award in 1993 in memory of her late husband, Sen. John Heinz, R-Pa., who died in an airplane crash in 1991.

“These are the great, great people of this country...they care about making this world a better place, not in a mushy way but in a true way,” Heinz said.

Farmer, who will receive the human condition award, co-founded Partners in Health (PIH), a not-for-profit organization that has established health clinics in impoverished areas throughout the Americas and Eastern Europe in 1987.

He splits his time between Harvard and a health clinic in Cange, Haiti.

“As a physician I serve people who otherwise would not have had access to care, ” Farmer said.

An expert in the treatment of tuberculosis and HIV, Farmer pioneered new methods in which health care workers personally oversee and monitor individual patients.

“These are symptoms of a much deeper ill in society,” he said. “The U.S. government administration right now has a hand in blocking clean water assistance, education assistance to the poorest nations, including Haiti. This embargo is not an act of God, but of mean-spirited policy.”

Heinz, who is Catholic, said that the recipients are “what Christ said Saints should be like.” They have “considerations that are much larger, broader, deeper. They take risks, they are persistent.”

Heinz suggested to the recipients that they use the unrestricted $250,000 award to “do something really fun with your wife and kids.”

Farmer said he intends to donate the money to PIH, but he reassured Heinz that he would heed her advice.

“I do intend to take my daughter to Disney World, though,” he said, “My mom lives in Orlando, so I can do it very cheaply.”

Spengler, the other Harvard recipient, will receive the shared environment award for his work to raise public awareness of indoor air pollution.

Spengler addressed the use of poor quality fuels in underdeveloped regions which lead to sick building syndrome and the poor air quality present in public housing.

His work with asthmatics in Boston’s public housing projects helped to reduce environmental triggers for asthma attacks.

“We don’t have a war on poverty. We have a war on poor people,” he said.

Spengler shares the award with Mario J. Molina, who shared the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on the effects of chlorophorocarbons on the earth’s stratosphere.

The awards are given to those with groundbreaking achievements in the areas that her late husband found important, Heinz said.

The five prizes awarded are for the arts and humanities, the environment, the human condition, public policy and technology, the economy and employment.

“[John Heinz] was someone who thought out of the box. He was joyful, persistent and never saw a problem that he didn’t think there was some solution to,” Heinz said.

Sen. Kerry announced yesterday that he will be treated for prostate cancer, which Heinz did not address at the press conference.

—Staff writer Ebonie D. Hazle can be reached at hazle@fas.harvard.edu.