Baruch Blumberg

Baruch Blumberg grew up in a Jewish household in Brooklyn, served as a Navy deck officer in the last years of World War II, and came home to study medicine rather than the physical anthropology that actually interested him. He earned his MD at Columbia in 1951, then went back for a doctorate in biochemistry at Oxford, drawn by a question that had nothing to do with treating individual patients: why some people got sick from diseases that left others untouched. He spent much of the 1950s traveling to remote populations, Alaska, the Pacific, sub-Saharan Africa, drawing blood, looking for genetic markers of susceptibility and resistance rather than the diseases themselves.

In 1964, screening blood serum from an Australian Aboriginal donor against samples from around the world, Blumberg found an unfamiliar protein he called the Australia antigen. He assumed at first it was a marker of some inherited blood trait. It turned out to be a piece of the hepatitis B virus, and its discovery gave doctors, for the first time, a way to test blood for the disease before transfusing it. Blumberg and his colleagues went further, using the antigen to build a vaccine, tested and licensed by the early 1980s and eventually administered to hundreds of millions of children worldwide. China's childhood infection rate fell from roughly fifteen percent to about one percent within a decade of adopting it. In 1976 Blumberg shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Carleton Gajdusek.

The vaccine Blumberg helped build did not immediately reach the population that gave him the discovery. Hepatitis B remained, and remains, most burdensome in the parts of the world with the least money to buy a vaccine developed largely in American labs and licensed through American pharmaceutical companies, and it took years of public-health argument to get it into routine childhood immunization in the countries that needed it most. Blumberg spent much of his later career on the distribution problem as much as the science, pushing the World Health Organization and national governments to fund mass immunization rather than treat it as a product for wealthy markets. He also, unusually for a Nobel laureate in medicine, spent his final years running NASA's Astrobiology Institute, studying how life might exist beyond Earth.

Blumberg died on April 5, 2011, hours after giving a talk at NASA's Ames Research Center, at eighty-five. Fox Chase Cancer Center's scientific director said afterward that Blumberg had likely prevented more cancer deaths than any person who ever lived, since chronic hepatitis B is a leading cause of liver cancer worldwide. Oxford created a professorship in virology in his name, and NASA and the Library of Congress jointly endowed an astrobiology chair for him, a pairing that reflects the two unrelated fields he actually worked in. The vaccine he made possible is now part of the routine immunization schedule for infants across most of the world.

Baruch Blumberg's life against the full span of the corpus.

• The Australia antigen discovery
  Later identified as a component of the hepatitis B virus 1964
• Hepatitis B blood test invention
  The first way to screen blood for the virus before transfusion 1971
• Hepatitis B vaccine invention
  Patented in 1969; licensed and in wide use by the early 1980s 1969
• Hepatitis B Foundation company
  Nonprofit he helped establish for research and patient support 1992

• July 28, 1925 aged 0 Born in Brooklyn, New York
• 1946 aged ~21 Graduates Union College after Navy service in World War II
• 1951 aged ~26 Earns his MD from Columbia
• 1957 aged ~32 Earns a DPhil in biochemistry from Balliol College, Oxford
• 1964 aged ~39 Discovers the Australia antigen, later identified as hepatitis B
• 1969 aged ~44 Patents a hepatitis B vaccine
• 1976 aged ~51 Shares the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Carleton Gajdusek
• 1999 aged ~74 Named founding director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute
• April 5, 2011 aged 85 Dies at NASA's Ames Research Center after a keynote address

• Jonas Salk 1914–1995
  Medical researcher who developed the first safe and effective polio vaccine. fellow vaccine pioneer
• Albert Sabin 1906–1993
  Medical researcher who developed the oral polio vaccine used in worldwide eradication campaigns. fellow vaccine pioneer
• Anthony Fauci b. 1940
  Physician-scientist who shaped federal responses to HIV/AIDS, emerging infections, and the COVID-19 pandemic. later public-health successor
• Carl Sagan 1934–1996
  Astronomer and science communicator who brought cosmology to millions through Cosmos and popular books. later colleague in astrobiology