Baruch Samuel Blumberg (1925 – 2011), aka Barry Blumberg, was an American physician, geneticist, co-recipient of the 1976 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (with Daniel Carleton Gajdusek), for his work on the hepatitis B virus. He was also the first director of NASA Astrobiology Institute.
He was also president of the American Philosophical Society from 2005 until his death. Blumberg and Gajdusek received the Nobel Prize for discovering “new mechanisms for th
The first hepatitis B vaccine was approved in the United States in 1981. A recombinant version came to market in 1986. Both versions were developed by Maurice Hilleman and his team. (a history of hepatitis B vaccine)
Preliminary work In 1963, the American physician/geneticist Baruch Blumberg, working at the Fox Chase Cancer Center, discovered what he called the “Australia Antigen”