Baruch Samuel Blumberg | |
---|---|
Born |
Brooklyn, New York, U.S. |
July 28, 1925
Died | April 5, 2011 Mountain View, California, U.S. |
(aged 85)
Nationality | American |
Fields | Biochemistry, Physiology |
Institutions |
Fox Chase Cancer Center University of Pennsylvania NASA Astrobiology Institute Library of Congress |
Alma mater |
Union College Balliol College, Oxford College of Physicians and Surgeons |
Known for | Hepatitis B vaccine |
Notable awards | Nobel Prize in Medicine (1976) |
Spouse | Jean Liebesman (m. 1954) |
Children | Jane, Anne, George and Noah |
Notes | |
Baruch Samuel Blumberg (July 28, 1925 – April 5, 2011) — known as Barry Blumberg — was an American physician, geneticist, and co-recipient of the 1976 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (with Daniel Carleton Gajdusek), for his work on the hepatitis B virus while an investigator at the NIH. He was President of the American Philosophical Society from 2005 until his death.
Blumberg received the Nobel Prize for "discoveries concerning new mechanisms for the origin and dissemination of infectious diseases." Blumberg identified the hepatitis B virus, and later developed its diagnostic test and vaccine.
Blumberg was born in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Ida (Simonoff) and Meyer Blumberg, a lawyer. He first attended the Orthodox Yeshivah of Flatbush for elementary school, where he learned to read and write in Hebrew, and to study the Bible and Jewish texts in their original language. (That school also had among its students a contemporary of Blumberg, Eric Kandel, who is another recipient of the Nobel Prize in medicine.) Blumberg then attended Brooklyn's James Madison High School, a school that Blumberg described as having high academic standards, including many teachers with Ph.Ds. After moving to Far Rockaway, Queens, he transferred to Far Rockaway High School in the early 1940s, a school that also produced fellow laureates Burton Richter and Richard Feynman. Blumberg served as a U.S. Navy deck officer during World War II. He then attended Union College in Schenectady, New York and graduated from there with honors in 1946.