science · 28 July 1925 · 100 years ago
birth
Born 28 Jul 1925; died 5 Apr 2011 at age 85.
Baruch Samuel Blumberg was an American physician who shared (with D. Carleton Gajdusek) the 1976 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine “for their discoveries concerning new mechanisms for the origin and dissemination of infectious diseases.” In 1963, Blumberg accidentally discovered an antigen in the blood of an Australian aborigine which he subsequently identified as the hepatitis B surface antigen, a molecule from the surface of the hepatitis B molecule. His report of this discovery (1967) at first encountered indifference, but when confirmed by others, the virus was acknowledged to be the cause of the disease. He then developed a vaccine, though it had high production cost and limited distribution. But his work led to other researchers using recombinant DNA technology to produce a successful vaccine now in widespread use.
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