Baruch Blumberg, Nobel winner and recent speaker at McCall, dies at 85

By Stacey Burling and Andy Wallace

Inquirer Staff Writers

Baruch Blumberg, 85, a Philadelphia researcher who won the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1976 for his work on hepatitis B, died Tuesday in Moffett Field, Calif.

He collapsed after giving a speech at the International Lunar Research Park Exploratory Workshop being held at the NASA Ames Research Center, said his daughter Anne Blumberg. Her father, who was the director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute from 1999 to 2002, had been in good health and died of an apparent heart attack, according to NASA. "He was as busy last week as he was his whole life," his daughter said.

Dr. Blumberg, who had worked at Fox Chase Cancer Center since 1964 and still maintained an office there, discovered the hepatitis B virus and later helped develop a vaccine against it. The vaccine, which is now made in a different way, was approved by the FDA in 1981. Dr. Blumberg's work also allowed blood banks to screen for hepatitis B, a blood-borne virus. It can cause serious liver disease, liver cancer, and death.

"His vaccine and his research have saved hundreds of thousands of lives," said Ann Skalka, basic science director emerita at Fox Chase in Northeast Philadelphia.

Friends and family described him as an unusually curious, outgoing, funny, affable, and adventurous man who traveled widely and loved walking in his beloved Philadelphia. He had given up active research in recent years but still had the title of senior adviser to the president and CEO at Fox Chase and university professor at the University of Pennsylvania. At NASA, he had focused his formidable intellect on studying the possibility of life in space.

Dr. Blumberg, who was known as Barry, was also the current president of the American Philosophical Society, a Philadelphia-based learned society founded by Benjamin Franklin.

Dr. Blumberg traveled the world for his research and was particularly interested in Lewis and Clark's journals, which were part of the society's collection. He started a Lewis and Clark grant program to help young scholars do field research, Annie Westcott, director of meetings for the group, said.