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Biochemist whose work on hepatitis B won him a Nobel prize
Baruch Blumberg, known as Barry, who has died aged 85, was an extraordinary man whose work blurred the boundaries between virology, immunology, anthropology and genetics. The pinnacle of his achievement came in 1976, when he was awarded the Nobel prize for medicine for his fundamental discoveries about the hepatitis B virus which he identified in 1967. These led to the invention of a vaccine and the saving of millions of lives.
Blumberg's discovery was the result of his interest in genetic polymorphism, of which the best known example is sickle-cell anaemia. People who carry two copies of the sickle-cell gene are severely anaemic and usually die in infancy, but many people carry one copy, and this protects them against malaria. Thus, many people carry potentially harmful genes that are beneficial in certain circumstances.
When Blumberg was studying antibodies in the blood of a haemophilia patient who had received many transfusions, he discovered that the blood reacted with an antigen in the blood of an Australian Aborigine. This antigen was made by one of the Australian's genes, and it proved, on investigation, to be identical to the surface antigen of the hepatitis B virus. The haemophilia patient had antibodies to hepatitis B. This led Blumberg to develop an antibody test for hepatitis that could be used by blood banks. At that time, post-transfusion hepatitis was common and not preventable. The test was rapidly put to use, and as a result, the incidence of post-transfusion hepatitis plummeted.
The hepatitis virus has two antigens, one on its surface and the other in its core, and it is the core of the virus that does the harm. Many carriers have no symptoms, and carry only the harmless surface antigen, called HBsAg. In 1969 Blumberg and his colleagues realised that this non-infectious surface antigen, found in people who had been infected with the virus but had recovered, could be injected into people as a vaccine. Many millions have since been protected against what was once a deadly disease. As liver cancer is usually a long-term consequence of hepatitis infection, the vaccine has also been referred to as the first "cancer vaccine".
Blumberg was born in New York City, the son of second-generation immigrants, Meyer Blumberg, a lawyer, and his wife, Ida. He was educated at a Hebrew school and Far Rockaway high school, and in 1943 enlisted in the US navy. He was commissioned as a deck officer and by 1946, the year in which he left the service, was a commanding officer. While in the navy he took a physics degree at Union College in Schenectady, New York.
Blumberg did a year's postgraduate work in mathematics at Columbia University (1946-47), and then, at his father's suggestion, entered Columbia's medical school, qualifying in 1951. During his studies, he served as a semi-professional hand on sailing ships. His seamanship, he once wrote, gave him essential training in problem solving, planning ahead and developing contingency strategies if things went wrong.
In the third year of Blumberg's medical training, the professor of parasitology arranged for him to spend several months in an isolated mining town in the high bush country of northern Suriname, accessible only by river. There he provided general medical services, delivered babies and undertook the first malaria survey done in that region. The population consisted of Native Americans, Hindus from India, Javanese, Chinese and Jews. Blumberg found that they responded very differently to infections such as elephantiasis, and this was the subject of his first research paper. The experience was to prove useful later in his career, when he studied genetic influences in disease, and was the first of many excursions doing fieldwork on tropical diseases.
After qualifying, he spent two years as an intern and resident at Bellevue hospital in lower New York, which was crammed with the city's poor. The overcrowded wards, with patients overflowing into corridors, were, Blumberg said, reminiscent of Hogarth's London, and made a strong impression on him. But staff morale was high, and the hospital took pride in never turning a sick person away.
In 1953, he was promoted to a fellowship in medicine at the Columbia-Presbyterian medical centre (now Columbia University medical centre), working on arthritis and on the biochemistry of hyaluronic acid. Two years later he went to Balliol College, Oxford, to do a PhD on hyaluronic acid. In 1957 he made a field trip to Nigeria, studying genetic variations in the proteins of milk and haemoglobins. This started the trail that eventually led to his findings on the hepatitis virus.
In the same year, he joined the US National Institutes of Health, in Maryland, where he continued his work on genetic variation and disease. This led to the establishment of the geographic medicine and genetics section, which he headed until 1964. At the Fox Chase cancer research centre in Philadelphia, where he became associate director for clinical research in 1964, and where he spent most of his remaining career, he built up a research team from around the world and conducted fieldwork in Africa, India, Canada, Australia, Japan and Scandinavia. He was also professor of medicine and anthropology at Pennsylvania University from 1977 onwards. Blumberg several times took leave of absence from Fox Chase, or combined his work there with other appointments. He spent 1989 to 1994 in Oxford, as master of Balliol College, and was a visiting professor at the universities of Pittsburgh, Stanford and Oxford.
From 1999 until 2002 he was director of the Nasa Astrobiology Institute, overseeing research teams looking into the origins, evolution, distribution and future of life on Earth, and elsewhere. But, he said: "I'd be very surprised if we found something in space that would look like ET. If we find something more like a virus or a bacterium, that would be astounding enough."
The author of several books, including Hepatitis B: The Hunt for a Killer Virus (2002) and 500 scientific papers, Blumberg received many honours and awards. In 2005 he was appointed president of the American Philosophical Society. His recreations included rock climbing, cycling, canoeing and farming cattle.
He is survived by his wife, Jean Liebesman, an artist, whom he married in 1954; their four children, Jane, Anne, George and Noah; and nine grandchildren.
• Baruch Samuel Blumberg, biochemist and medical anthropologist, born 28 July 1925; died 5 April 2011