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Baruch Blumberg - Forming a research group at Fox Chase Cancer Center (23/80)

60 views · Published 30 June 2017 · 3:00 · Indexed 20 October 2026

Channel: Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People · 2017 · Science & Technology

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To hear more of Baruch Blumberg’s stories, go to the playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QedXwz9QEXY&list=PLVV0r6CmEsFyPwAEJ9YaYAsj3ANqc9teW

The late Baruch Blumberg (1925-2011) was an American scientist and doctor whose most significant contributions to medicine include the identification of the Hepatitis B virus. He was one of three co-recipients of the 1976 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. [Listener: Rebecca Blanchard; date recorded: 2007]

TRANSCRIPT: Then I was able to form a research group. Because I was the Associate Director for Clinical Research, I had... Tim had a big grant. He'd gotten a grant from the National Cancer Institute that was, in effect, open-ended. They gave him a grant and they said, okay do clinical research. But they didn’t… he didn't specify what it was going to be. It was a seven-year grant. It would have been… in today's money it would be like, I don’t know, three, four, five million a year — seven years with no specification about what I had to do. Well, that was great. I didn't have to, you know, first of all apply for it, and secondly sort of justify what I originally said. No, mind you, I… they got annual reports and then we subsequently had an ancillary grant on doing this polymorphism work, so there was tacit approval. And it was more money than I could spend, I mean I often turned… turned money back to the NIH, not often, but a few times. And I was able to build up a research team here and… and when they first came, they came with certain skills: Tom was interested in endocrinology and in thyroid disease and so forth, and Al Sutnick in respiratory illnesses related to cancer, and… and they started working on that. But eventually, we all started working on the hepatitis stuff, or what we eventually knew as hepatitis. And we didn't… we didn’t start off with a team with some sort of set goal, we started off with a bunch of people who were working here on stuff, but they gradually became interested. I don't think I coerced them; it was just the… the demands, I mean Al continued his other research and so did Tom. But then, but, so we formed a team, and we did work together, and we had a very good kind of working relationship. We’d have, one of the things we had were called protocol sessions, but they were nothing to do with protocol, but we would design experiments jointly and… and we would, you know, decide and talk about them quite a lot and then we would formulate them, we would actually write down the hypothesis we were going to test. And then we were very, you might say, rigorous in monitoring to see exactly where we were, but with the understanding that we were a discovery operation. We weren't looking for a product, although Lord knows, we found several, you know, without looking. But again, there was… but I always had this confidence, as I said before, faith, you know, that it's going to lead to something.

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