Story
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.
Photographs
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Hero photograph: NASA / Wikimedia Commons
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