Baruch S. Blumberg Centennial: Nobel Laureate's Life & Work

Structural Chemistry
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11224-025-02461-2
IN MEMORIAM
Baruch S. Blumberg’s centennial—a Nobel laureate cutting
through scientific disciplines
Istvan Hargittai1
© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2025
Abstract
Baruch S. Blumberg (1925˗2011), MD, PhD, started out in physics then moved to chemistry, finally, became a physician
and research scientist. At an early stage, he worked with polysaccharides and returned to them at a later stage of his career.
He received the Nobel Prize for the discovery of the Hepatitis B virus and the invention of the vaccine to protect against it.
He concluded his career as director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute.
Keywords Baruch Blumberg · Karl Meyer · Alexander Ogston · Hepatitis B · Prevention of cancer · Hyaluronic acid ·
Astrobiology
Baruch S. Blumberg (1925–2011, Fig. 1) shared the 1976
Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine, awarded for “discoveries concerning new mechanisms for the origin and dissemination of infectious diseases.” His fundamental contribution
was the discovery of the Hepatitis B virus and the invention
of the vaccine that protects against it. He received his B.S.
degree from Union College in Schenectady, New York, in
1946; his M.D. from Columbia University in 1951; and his
Ph.D. in biochemistry from Oxford University in 1957. He
was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American
Philosophical Society, and many other learned societies.
He received numerous awards and distinctions. His career
in science cut through several disciplines, demonstrating
another example of the benefits of a broad-based education
(see, eg, the concluding remarks in [1]). I had read about him
before we first met in 2001 in Stockholm during the centennial celebrations of the institution of the Nobel Prize. During
our next meeting in 2002, at the Fox Chase Cancer Center
in Philadelphia, we recorded a long conversation [2]. The
present remembrance is based primarily on these meetings
and my readings about him and in some details it augments
his Nobel autobiography on the Nobel Prize site.
* Istvan Hargittai
[email protected]
1
Budapest University of Technology and Economics, PO
Box 91, Budapest 1518, Hungary
Fig. 1 Baruch S. Blumberg, 2002, in his office at the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia. Photograph by Istvan Hargittai
Vol.:(0123456789)
Structural Chemistry
Blumberg was born in New York City as was his mother.
His father immigrated to the United States and settled in
New York City when he was 5 years old and had no recollection of the location of the origin of his family except that it
was somewhere in Eastern Europe. He (the father) received
all his education in the city, attended an elite high school,
and studied at the legendary City College. For law school,
he went to New York University and became a lawyer. It was
at the time when university education was not mandatory for
lawyers; their usual path was to work for a lawyer to become
one. One of Blumberg’s uncles was already a successful
lawyer, and he assisted Blumberg’s father in building up
his career. This was the usual practice in their family; the
older siblings assisted the younger ones. Another of Blumberg’s uncles was a mathematician who aimed at becoming
a PhD in mathematics and that was not common either in
the United States at the time. This uncle went to Göttingen,
Germany, and his thesis was about differential equations.
Upon his return, he had a professorship in mathematics in
Ohio. His example was an inspiration for Blumberg who
decided early on to become a scientist.
Blumberg received his elementary education at the
Yeshiva of Flatbush. Then he attended the Far Rockaway
High School, which was one of several New Yok high
schools that graduated future Nobel laureates. It was founded
in 1897 and closed in 2011 due to fast declining grades.
Its building at 8˗21 Bay Street in Far Rockaway, Queens,
still houses schools. The future physicist Nobel laureate
Richard Feynman (1918–1988) was its most famous graduate. Another future physics Nobel laureate, Richter Burton
(1931–2018), started at this high school, but as a junior, he
moved to another school in Pennsylvania.
Blumberg began his higher education in physics as an
undergraduate at Union College in Schenectady, New York,
a small men’s college at that time. The physics instruction
was at a high level as General Electric had its research laboratory in Schenectady and supported the college. Its support included more than financial backing and its renowned
associates, among them the Nobel laureate Irving Langmuir
(1881–1957), visited the college and spoke to the students.
Blumberg’s studies were supported by a generous governmental stipend according to the famous GI Bill legislated to
encourage young, ambitious Americans to serve in World
War II and then receive college education. Blumberg served
in the U.S. Navy from 1943–1945, and majored in physics
at Union College in 1946.
He continued at Columbia University, and enjoyed the
lectures by physicist luminaries, former participants of the
Manhattan Project. However, following his father’s advice,
he soon switched from physics and mathematics to medicine, still at Columbia. His father did not have a hard time
convincing him to switch as Blumberg did not think he was
good enough for physics—at Columbia, he was surrounded
by truly brilliant physics students. Another reason for the
switch was his interest in dealing with people rather than
with theories and instrumentation.
Following graduation from medical school, he completed
a hospital training of four years, 1951–1955. He spent the
first two years in Bellevue Hospital on the Lower East Side
of Manhattan. This provided a rich clinical experience as
Bellevue was a city hospital; there was no charge—it was
paid for by taxes. Often, the hospital was very crowded;
it was obliged to take in anyone sick in need of a hospital
bed even if there was no space. The experience in Bellevue
was followed by Columbia Presbyterian Hospital and the
College of Physicians and Surgeons. Columbia Presbyterian
was different from Bellevue as it offered the opportunity of
doing research. Here, his prior experience with physics and
mathematics made it possible for him to work in physical
biochemistry.
From 1953–1955, Blumberg had a great opportunity of
doing research with a pioneer of the chemistry and physical
chemistry of polysaccharides, Karl Meyer (1899–1990, see,
eg, [3]). Blumberg got involved with the physical chemical
characteristics of the long-chain molecules of hyaluronic
acid and of sulfonated long-chain sugars. Blumberg did a lot
of light-scattering studies and centrifugation studies, using
Theodor Svedberg’s centrifuge. Hyaluronic acid (currently,
“hyaluronan” is used for its name; for its structural characteristics, see, eg [4]) has since become conspicuously important in medicine and cosmetics. It can absorb many orders of
magnitude larger amounts of water than its own weight and
provide flexibility. This explains the medicinal significance
of its presence in large amounts in the joints and the eye.
The umbilical cord also has a large amount of this substance.
Karl Meyer, as an excellent mentor, was a strong influence
on Blumberg. Meyer was a refugee from Nazi Germany and
several of Blumberg’s other teachers at the medical school
were also Jewish German or Jewish Austrian biochemists.
Meyer was not only a consummate chemist but had had clinical training. Although he did not practice clinical medicine,
he had a general feeling for human biology. Meyer was also
a very knowledgeable biblical scholar and in this, again, the
interests of mentor and mentee overlapped.
In 1957, after Columbia, Blumberg moved overseas, to
Oxford, to work with another noted researcher of hyaluronic
acid and other biopolymers, Alexander Ogston (1911–1996,
see, eg, [5]). One of Ogston’s projects especially interested
Blumberg, viz., the role of proteins in the physical characteristics of hyaluronic acid. The question was whether the
protein was essential for the functional structural characteristics of the hyaluronic acid molecules. Note that I refer to
hyaluronic acid molecules in plural as it has no well-defined
molecular weight; rather, it appears in a range of molecular
weights up to millions of Daltons. Blumberg used papain,
an enzyme derived from papaya, to remove the protein and
Structural Chemistry
see whether it influenced the birefringence, light-scattering,
and ultracentrifuge characteristics of the hyaluronic acid
sample [6–9]. Upon his return to the United States, Blumberg met yet another key figure of hyaluronic acid science,
Endre A. Balazs (1920–2015, see, eg, [10]), an immigrant
from Hungary, who had done a great deal for expanding the
applications of hyaluronic acid. At that time only animal
sources were available for obtaining hyaluronic acid and its
application caused inflammation, severely limiting its use.
Balazs worked out techniques of purification empirically
and made possible the inflammation-free medicinal use of
hyaluronic acid.
From the beginning of his career, Blumberg always
thought about the clinical significance of his research.
For some time, he worked in an arthritis clinic, and that
strengthened his interest in hyaluronic acid. Arthritis was
the subspecialty of internal medicine that he had selected
at that time. Although in the general view, hyaluronic acid
and other polysaccharides are far less important than proteins and nucleic acids, it was not his view. This is why
after he had made the milestone discovery of the Hepatitis
B virus and invented the vaccine for protection against it,
he returned to the polysaccharide field in the 1990s. Still,
his work in this area had direct relevance to Hepatitis B. It
was determined that glycosilation is extremely important
for the tertiary structure of the surface protein of the virus.
If the glycosilation process is interfered, is altered, using
drugs, then the virus does not assemble, it remains in the
cell and does not get exported. This forms the basis of possible therapy. This recognition dates to Blumberg’s time in
Oxford although he was not the principal discoverer of this
effect. He was instrumental in the invention of vaccination,
which is very effective for prevention, but the treatment is
not very effective.
Blumberg himself was amazed how his two research
directions coalesced. He believed that it was important to
chart research programs even though it was not possible to
predict the outcome. He also believed in the importance of
having good mentors, like he had in Karl Meyer and Alexander Ogston. His notion was always doing what he enjoyed
doing and doing it well. Luckily, his main period of research
was when science had virtually unlimited support; it was a
period of economic growth, a great expansion of society and
science, in the United States.
From 1964, Blumberg worked at The Institute for Cancer Research in Philadelphia. He built up a clinical research
direction without ever ignoring fundamental science. He created a large group in which researchers from many countries
participated, such as Finland, France, Italy, Poland, Venezuela, England, India, Korea, China, Thailand, Singapore, in
addition to Americans. He published a book about this work,
Hepatitis B: The Hunt for a Killer Virus [11], first published
in 2002 and republished in 2004. Its latest appearance was
its Kindle edition in 2018.
When I asked him about the most important means for
preventing cancer his response was the cessation of smoking.
In this he reminded me of Howard M. Temin (1934–1994), a
co-recipient of the 1975 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for “discoveries concerning the interaction between
tumor viruses and the genetic material of the cell.” When
asked about the significance of his research Temin preferred
to speak about the dangers of smoking as the most important
cause of human cancer.
Blumberg’s work connected with the prevention of cancer
was through the Hepatitis B vaccination program. At the
time of our conversation in 2002, Hepatitis B accounted for
about 85% of the primary cancer of the liver in the world. It
was one of the most common cancers, the third most common cause of death from cancer in males, and the seventh
most common cause of death from cancer in females. The
difficulty of its treatment was indicated by the statistics
according to which the life expectancy, after clinical diagnosis, was much less than a year, and the survival rate for
5 years—a frequent method of measuring the severity of a
cancer—was extremely low, 8–10%. Another major cause of
primary cancer of the liver is Hepatitis C, either by itself or
in combination with Hepatitis B. The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded for the discovery of the
Hepatitis C virus in 2020 (see, eg [12]).
Blumberg invented a vaccine in 1969 to prevent infection with Hepatitis B, and it became available for general
distribution in the 1980s. At the time of our conversation, it
was one of the most used vaccines in the world. More than a
billion doses had been used; hundreds of millions of people
had been vaccinated, leading to a striking decrease in the
prevalence of Hepatitis B infections in the world. Prevention
of Hepatitis B was the second most common intervention
program for prevention of cancer, as Blumberg never failed
to stress, cessation of cigarette smoking was the first.
In 1998, NASA founded its Astrobiology Institute at its
Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, and
appointed Baruch Blumberg its founding director. This did
not mean abandoning his previous positions and research, it
meant adding new ones. He kept his position at the cancer
center and his professorial appointments at the University
of Philadelphia. He welcomed the challenge, which opened
a new world for him and a new life. What qualified him for
the directorship, apart from his being a Nobel laureate, was
his managerial skills. Whereas NASA is a mission-oriented
institution, Blumberg’s organization was a basic research
institute in support of NASA’s goals. Blumberg compared
those goals to the first use of the telescope when every time
people looked through the tube, they discovered something
new. He was particularly interested in early evolution, the
very start of life, and prebiotic chemistry. He was intrigued
Structural Chemistry
by the information it would be possible to collect from the
tremendous amounts of organic substances that falls on
Earth every year in form of meteorites and other space dust.
He found the work for NASA very exciting. He wanted to
encourage young people to become scientists and wanted to
make high-school students and even grade-school students to
become interested in this area. He knew it will take generations to get their project finished.
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