Sir Michael Houghton (born 1949) is a British scientist and Nobel Prize laureate.

[8][9] Born in the United Kingdom in 1949, his father was a truck driver and union official.

[1] He won a scholarship to study at the University of East Anglia, graduating with a lower second class honours degree in biological sciences in 1972,[10] and subsequently completed a PhD in biochemistry from King's College London in 1977.

It was at Chiron that Houghton together with colleagues Qui-Lim Choo and George Kuo, and Daniel W. Bradley from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, first discovered evidence for HCV.

[17][18] In other studies published during the same period, Houghton and collaborators linked hepatitis C with liver cancer.