Irving Millman

Irving Millman was a New York-born Jewish microbiologist who did the unglamorous half of a famous discovery. Baruch Blumberg found the antigen. Millman helped turn it into a test and a vaccine — the engineering of a medical fact.

At Fox Chase they worked out how to detect hepatitis B in donated blood and how to prepare a killed-antigen vaccine. Blood banks became safer. A cancer-causing infection became preventable. That is not a small sentence.

He was a veteran and a careful lab man, not a memoirist. The papers are the portrait. Later histories sometimes shrink him to a second name. The work does not shrink.

Jewish American science is full of people like Millman: essential, precise, easy to omit from the poster. This directory exists so the poster has to make room.