B. Blumberg, discovered hepatitis B virus

WASHINGTON -- Baruch Blumberg, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist who discovered the hepatitis B virus and subsequently developed a preventive vaccine that saved millions of lives, died Tuesday. He was 85.

The Philadelphia resident died of an apparent heart attack while attending a conference at NASA's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field near San Francisco, according to a statement posted on NASA's website.

Blumberg had spent the latter part of his career helping NASA inaugurate its formal search for extraterrestrial life and clues about the origin of life on Earth. For Blumberg, who was trained a biochemist but became a leading scientist in the fields of virology, oncology and epidemiology, this new field was the next step in a long career of enviable breadth.

Still, Blumberg was best known for his work a half-century ago on hepatitis B, a virus that attacks the liver and can cause cirrhosis, cancer and death. He did not set out to conquer the virus. He was interested, instead, in figuring out why some people are more vulnerable to getting sick than others. That simple question led him to far-flung villages in Africa and the Arctic -- and serendipitously to the discovery of hepatitis B in the mid-1960s.

His identification of the virus allowed for the near-immediate development of tests used to screen potential blood donors, greatly and immediately reducing the transmission of hepatitis B via blood transfusions.

In the 1970s, Blumberg and a colleague, Irving Millman, developed a hepatitis B vaccine. Since it became commercially available in 1982, more than 1 billion doses have been administered around the world. The chronic infection rate among children has plunged -- from 15 percent in Taiwan and more than 10 percent in China, for example, to less than 1 percent in each country.

For "discoveries concerning new mechanisms for the origin and dissemination of infectious diseases," Blumberg shared the 1976 Nobel Prize for Medicine with Carleton Gajdusek, who did groundbreaking research on kuru, an incurable and infectious degenerative neurological disorder.

Blumberg began his hepatitis work at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., during the 1950s. He joined Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia in 1964 and served as associate director for clinical research and vice president for population oncology before holding the title of distinguished scientist in 1989.

From 1999 to 2002, he served as the first director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute at Ames.

Baruch Samuel Blumberg was born July 28, 1925, in New York. The son of a lawyer, he grew up attending Hebrew parochial school.

During World War II, the Navy sent him to study physics at Union College in Schenectady, N.Y. He graduated in 1946 and received a medical degree from Columbia University in 1951.

After earning a doctorate in biochemistry from Oxford University's Balliol College in 1957, Blumberg became chief of geographic medicine and genetics at the NIH.

He married Jane Liebesman, an artist, in 1954. Besides his widow, survivors include four children and nine grandchildren.