Brooklyn and the yeshiva
Baruch Samuel Blumberg, always “Barry” to friends and colleagues, was born in Brooklyn, New York, on July 28, 1925, into a Jewish family. His father, Meyer Blumberg, was a lawyer; his mother was Ida, née Simonoff. He began his education at the Orthodox Yeshivah of Flatbush, where alongside ordinary school subjects he learned to read and write Hebrew and to study the Bible and Jewish texts in the original. The same school, by coincidence, educated another future Nobel laureate in medicine, the neuroscientist Eric Kandel.
He went on to James Madison High School in Brooklyn and, after the family moved, to Far Rockaway High School in Queens, a school that also produced the Nobel physicists Richard Feynman and Burton Richter. During the Second World War he served as a deck officer in the US Navy.
Physics, mathematics, medicine
After the war Blumberg studied physics at Union College in Schenectady, New York, graduating with honours in 1946, and began graduate work in mathematics at Columbia University. He soon switched to medicine and earned his MD from Columbia’s College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1951. As a medical student he spent a summer working at a hospital run by a mining company in Suriname, in South America, his first taste of clinical research in the field.
He trained as an intern and resident at Bellevue Hospital and Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New York, then went to Balliol College, Oxford, where he earned a doctorate in biochemistry in 1957. In the same year he joined the US National Institutes of Health, where he headed the Geographic Medicine and Genetics Section until 1964.
Why do some people fall ill?
Blumberg’s guiding question was deceptively simple: why do some people catch a disease in a given environment while others do not? Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s he travelled the world collecting blood samples from many different populations, searching for inherited variations in blood proteins that might explain differences in susceptibility. One idea was that patients who had received many blood transfusions would develop antibodies against protein variants carried by their donors, and that their blood could therefore be used to detect those variants in other people.
Testing that idea in the early 1960s, Blumberg and his colleagues found that the serum of a heavily transfused patient reacted with something in a blood sample from an Aboriginal Australian. They called it the “Australia antigen.” It was rare in Americans and Europeans but far more common in some populations in Asia, Africa and the Pacific, and its meaning was at first a mystery.
Unmasking the hepatitis B virus
In 1964 Blumberg moved to the Institute for Cancer Research in Philadelphia, which later became part of the Fox Chase Cancer Center, where he would spend most of his working life. There the puzzle came together. His colleague Alton Sutnick found that the antigen was associated with inflammation of the liver, and a crucial observation came when a patient who had previously tested negative for the antigen turned positive at the same time as developing hepatitis. By 1967 Blumberg and his team had shown that the Australia antigen was part of the virus that causes hepatitis B, the surface coat of the virus itself.
It was a discovery of enormous importance. Hepatitis B infects the liver, spreads through blood and body fluids and from mother to child at birth, and in many people becomes a chronic infection that can lead decades later to cirrhosis and liver cancer, one of the deadliest cancers in the world. Blumberg’s later work helped establish the link between chronic hepatitis B infection and primary liver cancer.
A test and a vaccine
Having found the virus, Blumberg and his colleague Irving Millman moved quickly to put the knowledge to use. They developed a blood test to detect the virus, and from the early 1970s blood banks began screening donations with it, sharply reducing the transmission of hepatitis through transfusions. In 1969 they went further, devising a novel way to make a vaccine: by harvesting the harmless surface-antigen particles from the blood of chronic carriers and using them to stimulate immunity. Their institute patented the method, and Blumberg made sure the patent was licensed so that the vaccine could be produced. The pharmaceutical company Merck, under the vaccine pioneer Maurice Hilleman, developed it into the first commercial hepatitis B vaccine, approved in the United States in 1981.
That plasma-derived vaccine was later replaced, from 1986, by genetically engineered versions made in yeast. But the principle Blumberg and Millman established, that the virus’s surface protein could teach the body to defend itself, remained the foundation. In 1993 the two men were inducted together into the US National Inventors Hall of Fame.
Saving lives on a vast scale
Hepatitis B vaccination is now part of routine childhood immunisation across most of the world, usually beginning with a dose at birth, and it has been given to vast numbers of people. Because it prevents chronic infection, it is in effect one of the first vaccines against a human cancer. The results have been dramatic: in China, for example, deployment of the vaccine reduced the rate of hepatitis B infection among children from about fifteen per cent to about one per cent within ten years.
In 1976 Blumberg shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Daniel Carleton Gajdusek for “discoveries concerning new mechanisms for the origin and dissemination of infectious diseases.” Jonathan Chernoff, scientific director of the Fox Chase Cancer Center, later said: “I think it’s fair to say that Barry prevented more cancer deaths than any person who’s ever lived.”
Ethics and the Talmud
Blumberg devoted his Nobel lecture not to a victory lap but to bioethics. He warned that identifying chronic carriers of hepatitis B could lead to their exclusion, quarantine and denial of care, and came down firmly on the side of their liberty. The warning proved prescient. When New York City moved in the late 1970s to exclude known carriers, including developmentally disabled children who had been tested at the Willowbrook institution, from its schools, Blumberg advised the lawyers who successfully challenged the policy, setting a precedent that would matter again in the AIDS era.
He always credited part of his intellectual formation to Jewish learning. In discussing what had shaped him, he pointed to the mental discipline of studying the Talmud, and for much of his life, as often as he could, until his death, he attended weekly Talmud study classes. Saving lives, he told The New York Times in 2002, was what had drawn him to medicine, and he linked it directly to the Jewish teaching that to save a single life is to save the whole world.
Oxford, NASA and the stars
Blumberg’s later career was unusually varied. From 1977 he was University Professor of Medicine and Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. From 1989 to 1994 he served as Master of Balliol College, Oxford, the first American to hold the post. Then, in 1999, he took an unexpected turn and became the founding director of NASA’s Astrobiology Institute at the Ames Research Center in California, guiding research into the origins of life and the search for it beyond Earth, and later served as a senior adviser to the NASA administrator.
He was president of the American Philosophical Society from 2005 until his death, sat on the Library of Congress Scholars Council, and helped found the Hepatitis B Foundation in 1992, keeping an office there for years. He married Jean Liebesman in 1954; they had four children.
Blumberg also kept a foot in industry: from 2004 until his death he chaired the scientific advisory board of the biotechnology company United Therapeutics, convening conferences on nanomedicine and telemedicine. He was elected to the US National Academy of Sciences, and in 2010, aged eighty-five, he was still taking part in a science festival programme in which school students shared a brown-bag lunch with a Nobel laureate. His papers, some 458 linear feet of them, are held by the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, and in 2016 Pennsylvania placed a state historical marker in his honour.
His NASA service continued after he left the Astrobiology Institute: from 2003 to 2004 he was principal scientist of the agency’s Division of Fundamental Space Biology. He was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1994 and received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement in 2000.
Last day and legacy
Blumberg remained intellectually restless to the end. On April 5, 2011, shortly after delivering a keynote address at a NASA workshop on lunar research at the Ames Research Center in California, he died, apparently of a heart attack, at the age of eighty-five. The Library of Congress and NASA established a chair in astrobiology in his name, and Oxford created the Baruch Blumberg Professorship in Virology.
His legacy is measured in illnesses that never happened: transfusions that no longer transmit hepatitis, babies protected at birth, and liver cancers that will never develop in people who do not even know his name. A Brooklyn yeshiva boy who asked why some people fall ill and others do not ended up giving the world one of its most effective weapons against cancer.
Sources & further reading
Baruch Samuel Blumberg, Wikipedia · Baruch S. Blumberg, MD, PhD: A Life, Fox Chase Cancer Center · Baruch S. Blumberg, MD, 1925–2011, Virology Blog · History of Hepatitis B Vaccine, Hepatitis B Foundation · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life 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.