Baruch Blumberg

Origins and early life

Baruch Samuel Blumberg — Barry to everyone who knew him — was born in Brooklyn on 28 July 1925, the son of Ida Simonoff and Meyer Blumberg, a lawyer. He was raised in an observant Jewish family in New York and attended yeshiva: the Orthodox Yeshivah of Flatbush, where alongside the ordinary school subjects he learned to read and write Hebrew and to study the Bible and Jewish texts in the original, and where a contemporary of his, Eric Kandel, would also go on to a Nobel Prize.

He moved on to James Madison High School and then, when the family moved to Far Rockaway, to Far Rockaway High School, which produced Richard Feynman and Burton Richter as well; he served as a US Navy deck officer in the war, took a medical degree at Columbia in 1951, and a doctorate in biochemistry at Balliol College, Oxford, in 1957.

Work and career

Through the 1950s he travelled the world collecting blood samples, chasing a single question: why do some people in a given place fall ill while their neighbours do not? In 1964, comparing sera, he found an unknown antigen in the blood of an Australian aboriginal donor, and pursuing what it meant led him and his colleagues to the hepatitis B virus, to the proof that it can cause liver cancer, to a screening test that made blood transfusion safe from it, and to a vaccine — the first vaccine shown to prevent a human cancer.

He gave the patent away to speed its manufacture, and within ten years infection among Chinese children fell from fifteen per cent to one.

Later years

He shared the 1976 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Daniel Carleton Gajdusek, was Master of Balliol College from 1989 to 1994 — the first American to hold the post — directed NASA's Astrobiology Institute from 1999 to 2002, and died on 5 April 2011.