Baruch Samuel Blumberg
Baruch Samuel " Barry " Blumberg ( born July 28, 1925 in New York City; † April 5, 2011 in Mountain View, California ) was an American physician.
Blumberg attended as a student first yeshiva in Flatbush and entered 1943 - after graduating from high school - in the U.S. Navy one. After the end of World War II, he received his first degree in physics at Union College. He then moved to Columbia University, where he studied mathematics, but after some time switched to studying medicine. Here his interest in population genetics was awakened. According to a study in Suriname and studies on arthritis in the Bellevue Hospital Center in New York, he earned his doctorate at Oxford University degree with a research on hyaluronic acid. After a few years working for the National Institutes of Health, he joined in the early 1960s to the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia. 1999-2002 Baruch Blumberg was director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute.
Blumberg discovered in 1965 happened to be a protein of the virus of hepatitis B, when he joined as an anthropologist in the search for polymorphisms in the blood of different ethnic peoples to a particular protein at the Australian aborigines. He called the Australia- antigen protein and examined it in detail by means of immunodiffusion tests for cross-reactions. Used as a negative control his technical assistant Barbara Werner their own blood. After some time, this negative control was positive, the assistant had Australia antigen in blood and simultaneously developed acute hepatitis B. Thus, the context of the infection was made . Blumberg developed a first test to test donated blood for hepatitis B.
In 1976, he received together with Daniel Carleton Gajdusek received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine " for their discoveries of new mechanisms for the origin and dissemination of infectious diseases ". In 1975 he had received a Gairdner Foundation International Award. The end of 2011 taught NASA and the Library of Congress, a research professor of Astrobiology, which was named after Baruch S. Blumberg.