There are several people who are said to have saved the lives of millions of people, and American scientist Dr. Baruch Blumberg is one of them.
In the 1960s, Blumberg and his colleagues were investigating the disease on an aboriginal blood sample when they discovered the presence of a rare protein. The group named this protein the "Australian antigen" and set out to investigate whether this antibody-producing substance could exist anywhere else on Earth. Studies have found that this antigen is not very common among Americans, but is much more common in Asians, Africans, and some Europeans. The team also noticed that this antigen was more common in leukemia patients who received regular blood transfusions.
Baruch Samuel Blumberg (July 28, 1925 – April 5, 2011), known as Barry Blumberg, was an American physician, geneticist, and co-recipient of the 1976 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (with Daniel Carleton Gajdusek), for his work on the hepatitis B virus while an investigator at the NIH. He was president of the American Philosophical Society from 2005 until his death.
Further population studies showed that the antigen studied was actually part of hepatitis B, a form of hepatitis B, which was not yet known at the time and was extremely deadly. Hepatitis B is a dangerous virus that attacks the liver and causes cirrhosis, often leading to liver cancer or liver failure.
The fact that the researchers learned that this protein is actually a part of this virus paved the way for them to perform different tests on the virus. This new information helped to prevent the spread of hepatitis B virus, especially through blood transfusion. Because the presence of this virus in the blood sample taken before the transplant could now be tested. Blumberg and his team were then able to protect the outer wall of this virus from the blood of people who had the disease, and this step played a very important role in the development of the hepatitis B vaccine. Blumberg, who became famous for his hepatitis B vaccine, was also awarded the Nobel Prize in 1976.