Today is the 74th anniversary of Baruch Blumberg, an American research physician whose work has led to a blood test and a vaccine against hepatitis B. as head of geographic medicine and genetics section of the national Institutes of health, Blumberg has traveled the world and collected blood samples from remote ethnic groups to study the hereditary variations in blood proteins.
in 1963 while testing the blood of Australian aborigines, Blumberg detected a foreign molecule which was rare in North America. It was also discovered that this molecule, which he named the antigen, reacted with antibodies in the blood of hemophiliacs who were monitored for the strains of hepatitis. Three years later, he identified the antigen in the context of hepatitis B. Blood banks soon began testing the virus, and in 1971, the incidence of post-transfusion hepatitis had fallen 25% in the United States. A vaccine of his work became commercially available in 1982. Blumberg, who is now affiliated with Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, received a share of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1976.
[Source:EmilyMcMurrayEd notable scientific Twentieth Century (Gale Research Inc., ITP, 1995)]
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