Dr. Baruch Blumberg

Baruch Samuel Blumberg
Born	July 28, 1925 (age 85)
Nationality	American
Known for	Hepatitis B virus
Notable awards	1976 Nobel Prize in Medicine

Baruch Samuel Blumberg (born July 28, 1925) is an American doctor and co-recipient of the 1976 Nobel Prize in Medicine (with Daniel Carleton Gajdusek), and the current President of the American Philosophical Society.

He received the Nobel Prize for "discoveries concerning new mechanisms for the origin and dissemination of infectious diseases." Blumberg identified the Hepatitis B virus, and later developed the its diagnostic test and vaccine.

Blumberg first attended the Orthodox Yeshivah of Flatbush for elementary school, where he learned to read and write in Hebrew and to study the Bible and Jewish texts in their original language. That school boasts a contemporary of Blumberg - Eric Kandel, as another recipient of the Nobel prize in medicine. He then attended Far Rockaway High School in the early 1940s, a school that also produced fellow laureates Burton Richter and Richard Feynman.^[2] He then attended Union College in Schenectady, NY and graduated with honors in 1945.

Originally entering the graduate program in mathematics at Columbia University, Blumberg switched to medicine and enrolled at Columbia's College of Physicians and Surgeons, from which he received his M.D. in 1951. He remained at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center for the next four years, first as an intern and then as a resident. He then began graduate work in biochemistry at Balliol College, Oxford and earned his D.Phil in 1957.

Blumberg has been a member of the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia since 1964, and has held the rank of University Professor of Medicine and Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania since 1977. Concurrently, he was Master of Balliol College from 1989 to 1994. From 1999 to 2002, he was also director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute at the Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California.

Since 2005, Blumberg has also served as the President of the American Philosophical Society, the oldest learned society in the United States, dating to 1743. He had been elected to membership in the society in 1986.

In Oct 2010 Blumberg will be participating in the USA Science and Engineering Festival's Lunch with a Laureate program where middle and high school students will get to engage in an informal conversation with a Nobel Prize winning Scientist over a brown bag lunch.

His daughter Jane Blumberg is married to the Director-General of the BBC Mark Thompson.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baruch_Samuel_Blumberg

References

1. ^ "Baruch S. Blumberg - Autobiography." Nobel Prize.
2. ^ Schwach, Howard. "Museum Tracks Down FRHS Nobel Laureates", The Wave (newspaper), April 15, 2005. Accessed October 2, 2007. "Burton Richter graduated from Far Rockaway High School in 1948."
3. ^ Members Search: Baruch Blumberg." American Philosophical Society.
4. ^ "Lunch with a Laureate." USA Science and Engineering Festival.