Nobel winner Baruch Blumberg dies

He collapsed Tuesday while he was at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., to give a speech, his son George Blumberg said Wednesday.

Blumberg shared the 1976 Nobel Prize with D. Carleton Gajdusek for their "discoveries concerning new mechanisms for the origin and dissemination of infectious diseases,” according to the citation from the prize announcement that year by the Karolinska Institute, a medical university in Stockholm, Sweden. Gajdusek, who died in 2008, shared the prize for his work on so-called slow viruses, infectious agents, including one implicated in mad-cow disease.

Blumberg, born in New York City, in 1925, studied at Union College and at Columbia University and later at the University of Oxford’s Balliol College in England, according to a biography on the website of the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia. He returned to the United States in 1957 to join the National Institutes of Health and headed its Geographic Medicine and Genetics Section until 1964, when he joined Fox Chase, where he did a lot of his work.

After identifying hepatitis B in 1967, Blumberg and colleagues developed blood tests to allow blood banks to screen for the virus, amassed evidence of a link between hepatitis B and liver cancer and devised a new way to make a vaccine against the virus, the first vaccine capable of preventing a human cancer, the center said.

In 1999, Blumberg became the first director of NASA’s Astrobiology Institute, which is dedicated to the study of the origin, evolution, distribution and destiny of life in the universe.

"The world has lost a great man,” former NASA administrator Daniel Goldin said, citing the lives saved by his hepatitis B research and his work in building the institute. "Our planet is an improved place as a result of Barry’s few short days in residence.”

George Blumberg said his father’s death came as "a terrible shock” to the family.

"He was leading an incredibly active life, an extraordinary vigorous character and ... didn’t seem to have any loss of his capabilities,” he said. "”He was just going strong to the very end."

Besides his son, Blumberg is survived by his wife, another son, two daughters and nine grandchildren.