Baruch Samuel Blumberg

Baruch Samuel Blumberg (born July 28, 1925) is an American scientist and recipient of the 1976 Nobel Prize in Medicine for "discoveries concerning new mechanisms for the origin and dissemination of infectious diseases." Blumberg identified the Hepatitis B virus, and later developed the diagnostic test and vaccine for it.

Blumberg first attended Far Rockaway High School in the early 40s, a school that also produced fellow laureates Burton Richter and Richard Feynman. He then attended Union College in Schenectady, NY and graduated with honors in 1945. He then entered the graduate program in mathematics at Columbia University but his interests turned to medicine and he 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 a resident and then as an intern. He then began graduate work in biochemistry at Balliol College, Oxford and earned his Ph.D. in 1957.

He 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, Moffett Field, California.