Blumberg, Baruch Samuel

Blumberg, Baruch Samuel, 1925–, American biochemist, b. Brooklyn, N.Y., B.S. Union College, Schenectady, N.Y., 1946, M.D. Columbia, 1951, Ph.D. Oxford, 1957. From 1957 to 1964 he worked at the National Institutes of Health. In 1964 he became a professor at the Univ. of Pennsylvania, and in 1976 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with D. Carleton Gajdusek. Blumberg won his share for his discovery of an antigen in the blood of an Australian aborigine that contributed to the development of a vaccine against hepatitis B. In 1999 he was named director of NASA's Astrobiology Institute.