In 1976, Baruch Samuel Blumberg from the Institute for Cancer Research in Philadelphia was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine with D. Carleton Gajdusek “for their discoveries concerning new mechanisms for the origin and dissemination of infectious diseases.”

At the end of the 1960s Blumberg unexpectedly discovered an infectious agent for hepatitis B while researching blood proteins from people in different parts of the world. He demonstrated that the infectious agent was linked with a virus of a previously unknown type. The virus can be carried by people who do not become sick from it. These discoveries made possible both vaccines and tests to prevent spreading of the disease through blood transfusions.