Baruch Samuel Blumberg

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Baruch Samuel Blumberg (May 1999)

Baruch Samuel "Barry" Blumberg (born July 28, 1925 in New York City , † April 5, 2011 in Mountain View , California ) was an American physician and biochemist . Blumberg discovered hepatitis B , an infectious liver inflammation caused by viruses, and received a Nobel Prize for it .

Blumberg first attended the yeshiva in Flatbush as a schoolboy and joined the US Navy in 1943 - after graduating from high school . After the end of World War II , he earned a first degree in physics from Union College . He then moved to Columbia University , where he initially studied mathematics , but after a while switched to medicine. Here his interest in population genetics was aroused. In 1951 he received his doctorate in medicine. After studying in Suriname and studies on arthritis in Bellevue Hospital Center in New York, he acquired in 1957 at Balliol College of Oxford University a doctorate as a biochemist with the research on hyaluronic acid . After working for the National Institutes of Health for a few years , he moved to the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia in the early 1960s .

Baruch Blumberg was director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute from 1999 to 2002 .

In 1965, Blumberg accidentally discovered a protein from the pathogen causing hepatitis B when, as an anthropologist, while searching for polymorphisms in the blood of different ethnic peoples, he came across a special protein in Australian aborigines . He named the protein Australia antigen and examined it in detail using immunodiffusion tests for cross-reactions . His technical assistant Barbara Werner used her own blood as a negative control . After a while this negative control became positive, the assistant had Australia antigen in the blood and developed acute hepatitis B at the same time. This made the connection with the infection. Blumberg developed a first test to donor blood for hepatitis B to test and a vaccine against hepatitis B, along with Irving Millman .

In 1976 he and Daniel Carleton Gajdusek received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for their discoveries of new mechanisms in the development and spread of infectious diseases ". In 1975 he had received a Gairdner Foundation International Award . In the same year he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and in 1990 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . He was a member of the American Philosophical Society since 1986 and President from 2005 to 2011 . In 1993 he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame . At the end of 2011, NASA and the Library of Congress established a research professorship in astrobiology , which was named after Baruch S. Blumberg.

literature

  • Baruch S. Blumberg: Hepatitis B. The hunt for a killer virus . Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ 2002, ISBN 0-691-00692-X .
  • Harvey Alter: Baruch Blumberg (1925-2011). In: Nature , Volume 473, 2011, p. 155, doi: 10.1038 / 473155a .
  • Gisela Baumgart: Blumberg, Baruch Samuel. In: Werner E. Gerabek , Bernhard D. Haage, Gundolf Keil , Wolfgang Wegner (eds.): Enzyklopädie Medizingeschichte. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin and New York 2005, ISBN 3-11-015714-4 , p. 188.

See also

Web links

Commons : Baruch Samuel Blumberg  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/medicine-obituaries/8433131/Professor-Baruch-Blumberg.html
  2. ↑ Nobel Prize Winner Baruch Blumberg Dies of Apparent Heart Attack ( Memento from July 29, 2012 in the web archive archive.today )
  3. ^ NAI Central Remembers Barry ( Memento August 14, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) astrobiology.nasa.gov, accessed December 22, 2011
  4. ↑ Inductees: Baruch S. Blumberg. National Inventors Hall of Fame, accessed May 7, 2018 .
  5. ↑ Astrobiology Chair - Baruch S. Blumberg NASA / Library of Congress Chair in Astrobiology loc.gov, accessed on December 22, 2011
personal data
SURNAME Blumberg, Baruch Samuel
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Blumberg, Barry (nickname)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American medic
DATE OF BIRTH July 28, 1925
PLACE OF BIRTH New York City
DATE OF DEATH April 5, 2011
Place of death Santa Clara County , California