|T H E N I H C A T A L Y S T||M A Y - J U N E 2000| Nobelist
Baruch Blumberg on a Mission to NIH ASTROBIOLOGY AND THE SEARCH
FOR ORIGINS |by Fran Pollner| Shortly after Baruch Blumberg came
to NIH in 1957, he and others in the clinical research group hed
joined (in what was then known as the Arthritis and Metabolic
Diseases Institute) started a new section. It was Blumberg who
named the new section "Geographic Medicine and Genetics."
"Thinking of genes by themselves can be misleading," he
explains. "You cant look at just one gene at a time and you cant
look at genes outside the context of the environment of the
host, both internal and external." The world at large became the
site of his field work studying polymorphisms and their relation
to disease susceptibilitywork that led to the discovery of the
Australia antigen and later, after hed left NIH, to the
identification of the hepatitis B virus and the development of
the hepatitis B vaccine. Today, Blumbergs focus is still,
essentially, "geographic medicine a