- Person
- Baruch Blumberg
- Lived
- 1925–2011
- Field
- Medicine
- From
- American
The story
Baruch "Barry" Blumberg was born in Brooklyn in 1925, the son of a lawyer, and attended the Orthodox Yeshivah of Flatbush. After service as a naval officer in the Second World War he studied physics, then medicine at Columbia University, and earned a doctorate in biochemistry at Oxford. As a physician and geneticist at the National Institutes of Health, he travelled the world collecting blood samples to study why some people catch a disease in a given environment while others do not.
In the mid-1960s he found an unusual protein in the blood of an Australian Aboriginal man, which became known as the Australia antigen. After moving to the Institute for Cancer Research in Philadelphia, now Fox Chase Cancer Center, in 1964, he and his colleagues showed that it was the outer surface of the hepatitis B virus, a new kind of virus. They developed a blood test to detect it, which allowed blood banks to screen donations from 1971.
In 1969 Blumberg and the microbiologist Irving Millman invented a vaccine by an unconventional method: purifying the harmless surface particles that carriers' bodies produce in great quantities, and using them to teach the immune system to recognise the virus. The approach was licensed to Merck, tested successfully in a trial that showed more than 90 percent protection, and approved in the United States in 1981. Later versions were made by genetic engineering.
Blumberg and his colleagues also proposed, as early as 1969, that hepatitis B could cause primary liver cancer, and later studies confirmed it. That makes the hepatitis B vaccine the first vaccine to prevent a human cancer. Blumberg shared the 1976 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Carleton Gajdusek. He went on to serve as Master of Balliol College, Oxford, and as the founding director of NASA's Astrobiology Institute.
The World Health Organization now recommends hepatitis B vaccination for every baby within 24 hours of birth, and the vaccine offers nearly complete protection. By 2003 most WHO member states had national vaccination programmes. Jonathan Chernoff, scientific director of the Fox Chase Cancer Center, where Blumberg spent most of his career, said it was fair to say that Blumberg prevented more cancer deaths than any person who ever lived.
Why it matters
Screening for hepatitis B made blood transfusions safer, and the vaccine Blumberg helped create now protects children worldwide from a leading cause of liver cancer.
About Baruch Blumberg
Physician and geneticist who discovered the hepatitis B virus, co-invented its blood test and vaccine, and shared the 1976 Nobel Prize, work credited with preventing millions of liver cancers.
More about Baruch Blumberg
- Baruch Blumberg's blood test made transfusions saferBaruch Blumberg and Irving Millman developed a blood test for hepatitis B. Blood banks began screening donations with it in 1971, cutting transfusion infections.
- Blumberg's vaccine cut child hepatitis B in China to 1%After hepatitis B vaccination was rolled out in China, infection among children fell from about 15 percent to about 1 percent within ten years, a measure of Baruch Blumberg's legacy.
- Baruch Blumberg defended the rights of hepatitis carriersBaruch Blumberg used his 1976 Nobel lecture to warn against shunning virus carriers, and later advised lawyers who won children with hepatitis B the right to attend school.
- Baruch Blumberg championed the Hepatitis B FoundationBaruch Blumberg gave his personal support to the Hepatitis B Foundation from its start in the early 1990s and served as its distinguished scholar until his death in 2011.
- Baruch Blumberg licensed his vaccine for the worldBaruch Blumberg and Irving Millman patented a new way to make a hepatitis B vaccine, then made sure it was licensed so drug companies could produce it for the public.
Sources
- Baruch Samuel Blumberg Wikipedia
- Baruch Blumberg, MD, PhD: Biography Fox Chase Cancer Center
- Baruch S. Blumberg: Biographical NobelPrize.org
- Hepatitis B fact sheet World Health Organization
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.