American Decades
Blumberg, Baruch S. 1925-
VIROLOGIST
Virologist.
The 1976 Nobel Prize for medicine or physiology was awarded jointly to American virologists Dr. Baruch S. Blumberg and Dr. D. Carleton Gajdusek for their discoveries concerning mechanisms involved in the origin and spread of infectious diseases. Dr. Blumberg's identification of a chemical marker in the blood showing the presence of hepatitis B paved the way for an experimental anti-hepatitis B vaccine for this most severe and often fatal form of the liver inflammation known as viral hepatitis.
Medical Anthropologist.
Dr. Blumberg's interest in how and why people of different racial, ethnic, and family backgrounds react differently to disease in terms of resistance and susceptibility took him around the world. "In a lot of these places," he said, "I would be the only outsider except for some anthropologist. So, naturally, I got interested in anthropology and such questions as how...
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1970's Medicine and Health
- Overview
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Topics in the News
- The Abortion Controversy
- Acupuncture
- The Case of Karen Ann Quinlan
- Deinstitutionalizing the Mentally Ill
- The Economics of Health Care
- The Fitness Craze
- Health Maintenance Organizations
- Legionnaires' Disease and the Science of Epidemiology
- Lyme Disease
- New Technologies in Medicine
- Nursing in Transition
- Nutritionists and the Battle Over Sugared Cereals
- The Swine Flu Scare
- The Tuskegee Syphilis Study
- Who Worked in Health Care?
- Headline Makers
- People in the News
- Awards
- Deaths
- Publications
- Important Events in Medicine and Health, 1970–1979
