Baruch Samuel Blumberg

In 1954 he married Jean Liebesman, an artist and the couple was blessed with two sons, George and Noah and two daughters, Anne and Jane.

He considered the mental discipline of the Jewish Talmud as one of the influencing factors in his life and always tried, as far as possible, to attend the weekly Talmud sessions throughout his life.

On April 5, 2011, he died shortly after delivering a speech at the ‘International Lunar Research Park Exploratory Workshop’ which was held at the ‘Ames Research Centre’, of the ‘National Aeronautics and Space Administration’ (NASA) in California. According to his family he supposedly suffered a heart attack. He is survived by his wife, four children and nine grandchildren.

He was born on July 28, 1925, in Brroklyn, New York, in a Jewish family to Meyer Blumberg and his wife Ida. Meyer was a lawyer.

He completed his elementary education from ‘Yeshivah of Flatbush’, a Modern Orthodox private Jewish day school in Brooklyn. Here he was taught to read and write in Hebrew and studied the Jewish texts and the Bible in their original form. The school produced another Nobel Laureate, Eric Kandel, one of his contemporaries.

Thereafter he studied at ‘James Madison High School’ following which he relocated to Far Rockaway, Queens, where he joined ‘Far Rockaway High School’. The other Nobel Laureates having studied in the school were Richard Feynman and Burton Richter.

Soon after completing high school studies from ‘Far Rockaway High School’ in 1943, he joined the US Navy as a deck officer in the midst of the ‘Second World War’.

He completed college studies from ‘Union College’ in Schenectady, New York, under military sponsorship graduating with honors in BS Physics in 1946. The same year he left active military duty.

He was inducted as Chief of the ‘Geographic Medicine and Genetics Section’ of the ‘National Institutes of Health’ (NIH) of the US in Bethesda, Maryland, in 1960.

In 1964, the ‘Institute for Cancer Research’ (presently the ‘Fox Chase Cancer Center’) located in Philadelphia inducted him as the ‘Associate Director for Clinical Research’. He began his notable research work on epidemiology and virology in this institute during the 1960s which led him travel around the world with his colleagues.

During such field trips he investigated blood samples from hugely diverse population across the globe from Japan to Africa striving to resolve the reasons behind varying exposure and reaction to disease by people of different national and ethnicity. He tried to find out the reason behind contraction of disease by some people exposed to similar environments but not by all.

While he was examining yellow jaundice, in 1964, Blumberg found a surface antigen in the blood serum of an aborigine of Australia. In 1967 he discovered that the antigen is a component of a virus that is responsible for the most dangerous type of hepatitis, which is hepatitis B. He displayed that the virus has capacity of causing liver cancer.

As chance of transmission of the virus through blood transfusions was a common possibility, Blumberg and his associates further investigated and developed a test to screen for the virus to restrict it from spreading via blood donations.

In 1976 he jointly received the ‘Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine’ with Daniel Carleton Gajdusek.