Baruch Blumberg

Baruch Blumberg grew up in Brooklyn, served in the Navy, and became a physician who liked field work as much as the ward. He collected blood samples around the world looking for inherited variation. In one of those samples he found an antigen that pointed to hepatitis B.

The Australia antigen became a test, then a way to screen blood, then — with Irving Millman and others — the basis for a vaccine. Hepatitis B causes liver disease and cancer. A vaccine against it is a vaccine against a cancer. That still sounds like science fiction until you look at the graphs.

The 1976 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was shared with D. Carleton Gajdusek. Blumberg later directed NASA’s astrobiology institute, still chasing the question of how life organizes itself. He remained a Brooklyn talker with a global kit bag.

Jewish American medicine in the twentieth century is often this story: a kid from the boroughs, a federal or university lab, a disease that had been treated as fate. Blumberg made fate look like a virus, which is to say, like something you can meet with a shot.

Baruch Samuel Blumberg was born on July 28, 1925, in Brooklyn, New York City, the second of three children to Meyer Blumberg, a lawyer, and Ida Blumberg. His parents were second-generation Americans, with grandparents who had immigrated from Europe to the United States at the end of the 19th century as part of a wave of migrants drawn by opportunities in the New World. The family's Eastern European Jewish heritage influenced early aspects of Blumberg's upbringing, including exposure to religious texts and traditions.

Early home life emphasized intellectual rigor, with Blumberg attending the Yeshiva of Flatbush, where studies in the Hebrew Testament and Talmud complemented secular learning and fostered analytical thinking skills that later informed his scientific approach.