Lawrence of Judea
by Sir Martin Gilbert
The champion of the Arab cause and his little-known romance with Zionism.
T.E. Lawrence - better known in Britain and throughout the Middle East as Lawrence of Arabia - was a lifelong friend of Arab national aspirations. In 1917 and 1918 he participated as a British officer in the Arab revolt against the Turks, a revolt led by Sharif Hussein, later King of the Hedjaz. He was also an adviser to Hussein’s son Feisal, whom he hoped to see on the throne of Syria. For generations of British Arabists, Lawrence was and remains a symbol of British understanding of and support for the Arab cause. Virtually unknown, however, is his understanding of and support for Jewish national aspirations in the same era.
In mid-December 1918, a month after the end of World War I, Lawrence was instrumental in securing an agreement between Emir Feisal and the Zionist leader Dr. Chaim Weizmann. The meeting was held at the Carlton Hotel in London (a building subsequently destroyed in the London Blitz). At this meeting, Lawrence acted as the interpreter. Weizmann assured Feisal that the Zionists in Palestine should be able “to carry out public works of a far-reaching character” and that the country “could be so improved that it would have room for four or five million Jews, without encroaching on the ownership rights of Arab peasantry.”[1]
As Weizmann wrote in his notes on the meeting, Feisal explained that “it was curious there should be friction between Jews and Arabs in Palestine. There was no friction in any other country where Jews lived together with Arabs…. He [Feisal] did not think for a moment that there was any scarcity of land in Palestine. The population would always have enough, especially if the country were developed. Besides, there was plenty of land in his district.”[2]
On January 3, 1919, Feisal and Weizmann met again in London, to sign an “Agreement between the King of the Hedjaz and the Zionists.” Lawrence, who was once again the guiding hand in this agreement, hoped that it would ensure what he, Lawrence, termed “the lines of Arab and Zionist policy converging in the not distant future.”[3]
“We Arabs, especially the educated among us, look with the deepest sympathy on the Zionist movement.”
On March 1, 1919 Lawrence, while in Paris as the senior British representative with the Hedjaz Delegation, drafted and then wrote out in his own hand a letter from Feisal to the American Zionist Felix Frankfurter. In this letter, Feisal declared, “We Arabs, especially the educated among us, look with the deepest sympathy on the Zionist movement.” Feisal went on to say that Weizmann “has been a great helper of our cause, and I hope the Arabs may soon be in a position to make the Jews some return for their kindness. We are working together for a reformed and revived Near East, and our two movements complete one another.” The Jewish movement, Feisal continued, “is national, and not imperialist: our movement is national and not imperialist, and there is room in Syria for us both. Indeed I think that neither can be a real success without the other.” Feisal then added, in strong, optimistic words: “I look forward, and my people with me look forward to a future in which we will help you and you will help us, so that the countries in which we are mutually interested may once again take their place in the community of the civilized peoples of the world.”[4]
Related Article: Why Jerusalem Matters
If Lawrence’s support for Jewish national aspirations was not known to his contemporaries, it was perhaps suspected. In early 1920, as Lawrence prepared his wartime experiences of the Arab Revolt for publication, he wrote to the author Rudyard Kipling to ask if he would read the proofs of his book Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Kipling replied that he would be glad to see the proofs, but that, if it emerged from them that Lawrence was “pro-Yid,” he would send the proofs back to him untouched.[5]
Kipling was distressed at the thought that Lawrence might be pro-Jewish. And indeed, Lawrence’s view of the potential evolution of the Jewish National Home in British Mandate Palestine was far from hostile to Jewish hopes. In an article entitled “The Changing East,” published in the influential Round Table magazine in 1920, Lawrence wrote of “the Jewish experiment” in Palestine that it was “a conscious effort, on the part of the least European people in Europe, to make head against the drift of the ages, and return once more to the Orient from which they came.”[6]
Lawrence noted of the new Jewish immigrants: “The colonists will take back with them to the land which they occupied for some centuries before the Christian era samples of all the knowledge and technique of Europe. They propose to settle down amongst the existing Arabic-speaking population of the country, a people of kindred origin, but far different social condition. They hope to adjust their mode of life to the climate of Palestine, and by the exercise of their skill and capital to make it as highly organized as a European state.”[7]
As Lawrence envisaged it in his Round Table article, this settlement would be done in a way that would be beneficial to the Arabs. “The success of their scheme,” he wrote of the Zionists, “will involve inevitably the raising of the present Arab population to their own material level, only a little after themselves in point of time, and the consequences might be of the highest importance for the future of the Arab world. It might well prove a source of technical supply rendering them independent of industrial Europe, and in that case the new confederation might become a formidable element of world power.”[8]
It seemed to Lawrence - as it did to Winston Churchill when he discussed the question of eventual Jewish sovereignty with the Peel Commissioners in 1937, shortly after Lawrence’s death - that it would take a long time before a Jewish majority would come into being. Such a contingency, Lawrence had written in his Round Table article, “will not be for the first or even for the second generation, but it must be borne in mind in any laying out of foundations of empire in Western Asia.” These, to a very large extent, “must stand or fall by the course of the Zionist effort.”[9]
When Churchill became colonial secretary in January 1921, he appointed Lawrence to be his Arab affairs adviser. At the outset of his appointment, Lawrence held talks with Feisal about Britain’s Balfour-Declaration promise of a Jewish National Home in Palestine. Reporting on these talks to Churchill in a letter dated January 17, 1921, Lawrence was able to assure the new colonial secretary - responsible for finalizing the terms of the Palestine Mandate - that in return for Arab sovereignty in Baghdad, Amman, and Damascus, Feisal “agreed to abandon all claims of his father to Palestine.”[10]
This was welcome news for Churchill, but there was a problem. Since the French were already installed in Damascus, and were not willing to make way for Feisal or any Arab leader, Churchill proposed giving Feisal, instead of the throne of Syria, the throne of Iraq, and at the same time giving Feisal’s brother Abdullah the throne of Transjordan, that part of Britain’s Palestine Mandate lying to the east of the River Jordan. Installing an Arab ruler in Transjordan would enable Western Palestine - the area from the Mediterranean Sea to the River Jordan, which now comprises both Israel and the West Bank - to become the location of the Jewish National Home under British control, in which, in Churchill’s words, the Jews were to go “of right, and not on sufferance.”[11]
“[Churchill] trusted that under the influence of a just policy,” Arab opposition to Zionism “would have decreased, if it had not entirely disappeared.”
Briefed by Lawrence at the March 17, 1921, Cairo Conference, Churchill explained to the senior officials gathered there that the presence of an Arab ruler under British control east of the Jordan would enable Britain to prevent anti-Zionist agitation from the Arab side of the river. In support of this view, Lawrence himself told the conference, as the secret minutes recorded: “He [Churchill] trusted that in four or five years, under the influence of a just policy,” Arab opposition to Zionism “would have decreased, if it had not entirely disappeared.”[12]
Lawrence went on to explain to the conference that “it would be preferable to use Trans-Jordania as a safety valve, by appointing a ruler on whom we could bring pressure to bear, to check anti-Zionism.” The “ideal” ruler would be “a person who was not too powerful, and who was not an inhabitant of Trans-Jordania, but who relied upon His Majesty’s Government for the retention of his office.”[13] That ruler, Lawrence believed, would best be Emir Abdullah, Feisal’s brother.
The presence of Lawrence of Arabia at the Cairo Conference was of inestimable benefit to Churchill in his desire to help establish a Jewish National Home in Palestine. Lawrence’s friendship with the Arab leaders, with whom he had fought during the Arab Revolt, and his knowledge of their weaknesses as well as their strengths, was paralleled by his understanding of Zionist aspirations. In November 1918, on the first anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, Lawrence had told a British Jewish newspaper, “Speaking entirely as a non-Jew, I look on the Jews as the natural importers of Western leaven so necessary for countries of the Near East.”[14]
On March 27, 1921, ten days after Lawrence’s suggestions in Cairo, Churchill sent him from Jerusalem to Transjordan to explain to Abdullah that his authority would end at the eastern bank of the River Jordan; that the Jews were to be established in the lands between the Mediterranean and the Jordan (“Western Palestine”); and that he, Abdullah, must curb all anti-Zionist activity and agitation among his followers.
The next day, in Jerusalem, Lawrence, Churchill, and Abdullah were photographed at British Government House: Churchill bundled up against the cold, Lawrence in a dark suit and tie, Abdullah in army uniform with Arab headdress. At their meeting that day, Abdullah agreed to limit the area of his control to Transjordan and to refrain from any action against the Jewish National Home provisions of the Palestine Mandate west of the Jordan.
Lawrence had thus helped ensure that the building up of the Jewish National Home could continue. He already knew that national home’s potential: Twelve years before the Cairo Conference, while traveling through the Galilee around Tiberias, he reflected on the glory days of the region in Roman times, and on the Jewish farm settlements he saw on his travels. Writing home on August 2, 1909, he explained, “Galilee was the most Romanized province of Palestine. Also the country was well peopled, and well watered artificially: There were not twenty miles of thistles behind Capernaum! And on the way round the lake they did not come upon dirty, dilapidated Bedouin tents, with the people calling to them to come in and talk, while miserable curs came snapping at their heels: Palestine was a decent country then, and could so easily be made so again. The sooner the Jews farm it all the better: Their colonies are bright spots in a desert.”[15]
The rest is well known: The “bright spots in a desert” evolved into a thriving state on the basis of the skill and capital Lawrence marveled at decades prior. It is hard to know how he would have responded to the Arab world’s growing intransigence toward the Jewish presence in the British Mandate, let alone to its violent attempts to destroy the Jewish State while still in its birth pangs - the same State that he believed held such promise for the Arabs of the region. T.E. Lawrence died in May 1935 of fatal injuries sustained in a motorcycle accident near his cottage in Dorset, at the age of only forty-seven. The accomplishments of his short life have assured his place in the pantheon of modern Arab history. Perhaps it is now time that modern Jewish history paid him homage as well.
This essay originally appeared in Azure 38, Autumn 2009, and is being published with permission. [link to azure.org.il ]
Notes:
From Chaim Weizmann’s interview with Emir Feisal at the Carlton Hotel, December 11, 1918, archives of the British Foreign Office in the Public Record Office, London, 371/3420.
Text reprinted in David Hunter Miller, My Diaries of the Conference of Paris (New York: Appeal, 1924), vol. 3, pp. 188-189.
T.E. Lawrence Papers, quoted in Martin Gilbert, Churchill and the Jews: A Lifelong Friendship (New York: Henry Holt, 2007), p. 51.
Letter from Feisal to Frankfurter, March 1, 1919, reprinted in the New York Times on March 5, 1919, the Times (London) on March 6, 1919, and the Jewish Chronicle (London) on March 7, 1919. See Isaiah Friedman, Palestine, a Twice-Promised Land?: The British, Arabs, and Zionism, 1915-1920 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 2000), p. 228.
Kipling to Lawrence, July 20, 1920, The Letters of Rudyard Kipling, vol. 5, 1920-1930, ed. Thomas Pinney (Iowa City: University of Iowa, 2004), p. 126.
T.E. Lawrence, “The Changing East,” The Round Table, September 1920. Available at http://telawrence.net/telawrencenet/works/articles_essays/1920_changing_east.htm.
Lawrence, “The Changing East.”
Lawrence, “The Changing East.”
Lawrence, “The Changing East.”
Letters from T.E. Lawrence to Churchill’s private secretary, January 17, 1921. Churchill Papers, 17/14.
British White Paper of June 1922, cited in Gilbert, Churchill and the Jews, p. 46.
Colonial Office Papers 935/1/1, cited in Gilbert, Churchill and the Jews, p. 51.
Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, vol. 4, 1917-1922 The Stricken World (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), p. 553.
Message to the Jewish Guardian, November 28, 1918, cited in Gilbert, Churchill and the Jews, p. 51.
David Garnett, ed., The Letters of T.E. Lawrence (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1938), p. 71.
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
Sunday, July 10, 2011
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
Dray Tekhterlekh - Yiddish song from Cracow
A melancholic song in yiddish, about a father giving away all hes three daughters in marriage.. Written by the late Mordechai Gebirtig, and the sung by the great Bente Kahan.
All the pictures are from the US holocaust memorial museum!
Translation;
1.
When, with good luck, there arrives the day
When I marry off my youngest daughter,
I will dance and dance
A burden has been taken off my mind-
My eldest daughter is getting married
I have two more maiden daughters waiting for their turn to
be married
You bandsmen, tear at your strings!
Let everyone rejoice with us.
My joy is so great.
Only the good God can understand how great it is,
And so can those who have also given away their daughters
in marriage
2.
When I see my second daughter getting married in her white
wedding dress,
I will drink wine with joy -
What a burden off my shoulder!
You bandsmen - tear at yours strings!
My second daughter is getting married.
Now it is only my youngest one who remains in the house
I wish she would be married soon, too
Play, bandsmen play for our in-laws!
Let all poor folk share our happiness
We are having our child settled down to married life
And this child is a daughter, too
3.
Now the sounds of a third wedding are dying away
And this makes me sad and thoughtful
My youngest daughter is gone
What else is there for me to be living for?
You bandsmen, play for the bride.
All three daughters have now been given away in marriage
All our children have left us
It was hard for us to bring them up,
And without them life is even harder
Go on playing.
Let my tears run down.
Today, the last bed will be deserted
Their room will be empty
And so will their wardrobe
Oh, how desolate the life is now.
Monday, April 11, 2011
Sunday, April 10, 2011
W. H. Prusoff, Who Developed AIDS Drug, Is Dead at 90
William H. Prusoff, a pharmacologist at the Yale School of Medicine who, with a colleague, developed an effective component in the first generation of drug cocktails used to treat AIDS, died on Sunday in New Haven. He was 90 and lived in Branford, Conn.
Click to enlarge
William H. Prusoff worked at the Yale School of Medicine.
Buy photo
George Ruhe for The New York Times
The death was confirmed by his son, Alvin.
Dr. Prusoff spent most of his long career studying molecular derivatives of thymidine, a building block of DNA. His work led him to develop two important antiviral drugs.
In the early 1950s, he synthesized idoxuridine, a successful treatment for infant keratitis. The condition, an inflammation of the cornea caused by the herpes simplex virus, was the leading infectious cause of blindness. Idoxuridine disrupted the virus’s ability to reproduce.
This was an important breakthrough. At the time, it was believed that antiviral agents powerful enough to be effective would be too toxic for human use and that those safe for use would be too weak to counteract a virus.
Idoxuridine overturned medical dogma and, after winning approval by the Food and Drug Administration, became the first clinically used antiviral drug. For this reason, Dr. Prusoff is sometimes called the father of antiviral chemotherapy.
In the mid-1980s, as the AIDS epidemic spread, Dr. Prusoff and a Yale colleague, Tai-shun Lin, began looking at thymidine derivatives that had been developed to treat cancer but discarded when they proved ineffective. One of these was stavudine, also known as d4T, a molecular cousin of the first AIDS drug, AZT. Both had been synthesized in the 1960s by Dr. Jerome P. Horwitz at the Michigan Cancer Foundation, now the Karmanos Cancer Institute, in Detroit.
Dr. Prusoff and Dr. Lin resynthesized the molecule and found in laboratory tests that it short-circuited the viral enzyme in H.I.V., causing it to produce short, incomplete pieces of DNA rather than complete strands.
Yale took out a patent in the doctors’ names and licensed it to Bristol-Myers Squibb for development. In 1992, it became the first drug to be tested under the F.D.A.’s parallel-track policy, which allowed patients with life-threatening illnesses to obtain drugs undergoing clinical trials.
After F.D.A. approval, stavudine was brought to market in pill form in 1994 and sold under the brand name Zerit. It joined three other drugs, known as nucleoside analogs, approved for treating H.I.V.: zidovudine (AZT), didanosine (ddI) and zalcitabine (ddC). Eventually, these were joined by a new generation of drugs known as protease inhibitors.
Because of its potential side effects, notably numbness, burning sensations and loss of fat in the feet, legs or hands, the drug is now used primarily in poor countries, where it is cheap and widely available.
Stavudine earned tens of millions of dollars for Yale each year — more than the total amount for all its other licensed medicines combined. It also made millions for Dr. Prusoff, who became a vocal supporter of a campaign initiated by Doctors Without Borders to persuade Bristol-Meyers to lower the drug’s price in sub-Saharan Africa, where AIDS was rampant.
In March 2001, the company announced that it was reducing the price of the drug in Africa to 15 cents for a daily dose, from $2.23, and removing barriers to the sale of generic equivalents there.
“We weren’t doing this to make money,” Dr. Prusoff told the Yale School of Medicine Chronicle. “We were interested in developing a compound that would be a benefit to society.”
William Herman Prusoff, known as Bill, was born on June 25, 1920, in Brooklyn. His parents, Jewish immigrants from Russia, ran a small grocery.
He earned a degree in chemistry from the University of Miami in 1941. Rejected by the Army because of his poor vision, he spent World War II inspecting fuses at a munitions factory in Memphis and, as a health inspector, checking the water supply and the kitchens in Miami Beach hotels where pilots were billeted.
Urged by his parents, he applied to medical school, without success. He later enjoyed recalling that Yale deemed him so unqualified that it refunded his application fee in a gesture of pity.
Instead, he earned a doctorate in chemistry from Columbia in 1949 and then taught pharmacology in Cleveland at Western Reserve University (now Case Western Reserve) before joining the pharmacology department at Yale in 1953.
Dr. Prusoff used some of his patent money to create the William H. Prusoff Foundation, which supported numerous programs, including the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Anti-Semitism. He also endowed lectureships in virology and pharmacology at Yale and several scientific prizes.
In addition to his son, Alvin, of Fairfield, Conn., he is survived by a daughter, Laura, of Ortahisar, Turkey, and three grandchildren.
Click to enlarge
William H. Prusoff worked at the Yale School of Medicine.
Buy photo
George Ruhe for The New York Times
The death was confirmed by his son, Alvin.
Dr. Prusoff spent most of his long career studying molecular derivatives of thymidine, a building block of DNA. His work led him to develop two important antiviral drugs.
In the early 1950s, he synthesized idoxuridine, a successful treatment for infant keratitis. The condition, an inflammation of the cornea caused by the herpes simplex virus, was the leading infectious cause of blindness. Idoxuridine disrupted the virus’s ability to reproduce.
This was an important breakthrough. At the time, it was believed that antiviral agents powerful enough to be effective would be too toxic for human use and that those safe for use would be too weak to counteract a virus.
Idoxuridine overturned medical dogma and, after winning approval by the Food and Drug Administration, became the first clinically used antiviral drug. For this reason, Dr. Prusoff is sometimes called the father of antiviral chemotherapy.
In the mid-1980s, as the AIDS epidemic spread, Dr. Prusoff and a Yale colleague, Tai-shun Lin, began looking at thymidine derivatives that had been developed to treat cancer but discarded when they proved ineffective. One of these was stavudine, also known as d4T, a molecular cousin of the first AIDS drug, AZT. Both had been synthesized in the 1960s by Dr. Jerome P. Horwitz at the Michigan Cancer Foundation, now the Karmanos Cancer Institute, in Detroit.
Dr. Prusoff and Dr. Lin resynthesized the molecule and found in laboratory tests that it short-circuited the viral enzyme in H.I.V., causing it to produce short, incomplete pieces of DNA rather than complete strands.
Yale took out a patent in the doctors’ names and licensed it to Bristol-Myers Squibb for development. In 1992, it became the first drug to be tested under the F.D.A.’s parallel-track policy, which allowed patients with life-threatening illnesses to obtain drugs undergoing clinical trials.
After F.D.A. approval, stavudine was brought to market in pill form in 1994 and sold under the brand name Zerit. It joined three other drugs, known as nucleoside analogs, approved for treating H.I.V.: zidovudine (AZT), didanosine (ddI) and zalcitabine (ddC). Eventually, these were joined by a new generation of drugs known as protease inhibitors.
Because of its potential side effects, notably numbness, burning sensations and loss of fat in the feet, legs or hands, the drug is now used primarily in poor countries, where it is cheap and widely available.
Stavudine earned tens of millions of dollars for Yale each year — more than the total amount for all its other licensed medicines combined. It also made millions for Dr. Prusoff, who became a vocal supporter of a campaign initiated by Doctors Without Borders to persuade Bristol-Meyers to lower the drug’s price in sub-Saharan Africa, where AIDS was rampant.
In March 2001, the company announced that it was reducing the price of the drug in Africa to 15 cents for a daily dose, from $2.23, and removing barriers to the sale of generic equivalents there.
“We weren’t doing this to make money,” Dr. Prusoff told the Yale School of Medicine Chronicle. “We were interested in developing a compound that would be a benefit to society.”
William Herman Prusoff, known as Bill, was born on June 25, 1920, in Brooklyn. His parents, Jewish immigrants from Russia, ran a small grocery.
He earned a degree in chemistry from the University of Miami in 1941. Rejected by the Army because of his poor vision, he spent World War II inspecting fuses at a munitions factory in Memphis and, as a health inspector, checking the water supply and the kitchens in Miami Beach hotels where pilots were billeted.
Urged by his parents, he applied to medical school, without success. He later enjoyed recalling that Yale deemed him so unqualified that it refunded his application fee in a gesture of pity.
Instead, he earned a doctorate in chemistry from Columbia in 1949 and then taught pharmacology in Cleveland at Western Reserve University (now Case Western Reserve) before joining the pharmacology department at Yale in 1953.
Dr. Prusoff used some of his patent money to create the William H. Prusoff Foundation, which supported numerous programs, including the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Anti-Semitism. He also endowed lectureships in virology and pharmacology at Yale and several scientific prizes.
In addition to his son, Alvin, of Fairfield, Conn., he is survived by a daughter, Laura, of Ortahisar, Turkey, and three grandchildren.
Thursday, April 7, 2011
Baruch Blumberg, Who Discovered and Tackled Hepatitis B, Dies at 85
By H. ROGER SEGELKEN
Dr. Baruch S. Blumberg, the Nobel Prize-winning biochemist and medical anthropologist who discovered the hepatitis B virus, showed that it could cause liver cancer and then helped develop a powerful vaccine to fight it, saving millions of lives, died Tuesday in Moffett Field, Calif. He was 85 and lived in Philadelphia.
His family said he died, apparently of a heart attack, shortly after giving a keynote speech at a NASA conference at the Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, which is in the San Francisco Bay area. Dr. Blumberg had long been associated with a NASA project to hunt for micro-organisms in space.
Dr. Blumberg’s prize-winning virology and epidemiology work began in the 1960s at the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia and took him and his colleagues on field trips around the world, from Japan to Africa.
The work led to the discovery of the hepatitis B virus in 1967, the first test for hepatitis B in the blood supply and the development in 1969 of the hepatitis B vaccine — the first “cancer vaccine.” Dr. Irving Millman, a colleague at the research center, was its co-creator.
Dr. Blumberg’s discoveries have been compared to those of Jonas Salk, the developer of the polio vaccine. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1976 with D. Carleton Gajdusek for their work on the origins and spread of infectious viral diseases. (Dr. Gajdusek had discovered the cause of the kuru, or “trembling disease,” prevalent in New Guinea.)
Almost 20 years later, after decades of hepatitis B-related studies and a global search for medicinal plants to treat hepatic infections, Dr. Blumberg began what he called his second career. In 1999 he became the founding director of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Astrobiology Institute.
The institute’s mission was to oversee research teams in the development of life-detecting devices for planetary rovers and asteroid fly-bys, and to scrutinize life forms in “extreme” environments on Earth, like the ocean bottom and the geothermal cauldrons that produce geysers. He joined several expeditions himself.
To these seemingly disparate endeavors — investigating disease-causing organisms and postulating alien or primordial life forms — Dr. Blumberg contributed a broadened understanding of the evolutionary phenomenon called polymorphism, in which a species can adapt to an environment through changes in appearances and functions.
From his base in Philadelphia, Dr. Blumberg began investigating viruses with a study of yellow jaundice, so named because of the characteristic vivid yellowing of the eyes and skin. As early as 1940, medical researchers had determined that there were two different forms of virus-induced jaundice, one that is transmitted as an intestinal infection, and the other spread mainly by blood transfusions.
Scientific field trips to pinpoint the agent responsible for blood-borne jaundice were conducted by Dr. Blumberg and his colleagues in the Philippines, India, Japan, Canada, Scandinavia, Australia and Africa. Ultimately it was blood serum from an infected Australian aborigine that yielded the so-called Australian antigen, a protein found on the surface of the hepatitis B virus.
After he and Dr. Millman developed the hepatitis vaccine, they struggled to interest a pharmaceutical company to help develop and produce it.
“Vaccines are not an attractive product for pharmaceutical companies in that they are often used once or only a few times and they ordinarily do not generate as much income as a medication for a chronic disease that must be used for many years,” Dr. Blumberg wrote in an autobiographical essay for the Nobel committee.
Moreover, he said, the medical research community in the early 1970s remained skeptical about the claim that a virus had been identified and a vaccine developed.
Ultimately he and Dr. Millman signed an agreement with Merck & Company, whose vaccine laboratories were near Philadelphia.
Dr. Blumberg’s discoveries are credited with saving millions of patients from ever developing liver cancer. But in his scientific autobiography, “Hepatitis B: The Hunt for a Killer Virus” (Princeton University Press, 2002), he observed ruefully that hepatic disease was still killing 1.5 million people a year worldwide — despite the widespread availability of the vaccines he helped develop — and that 350 million were chronically infected.
Still, he was hopeful. “Life — and death — are full of surprises,” he wrote, “and while it may be tempting fate to be too optimistic, it appears likely that within the next few decades this virus will be effectively controlled.” (There is still no vaccine for the blood-borne hepatitis C, one of the five known hepatitis viruses.)
Dr. Blumberg’s traced his fascination with inherited variations in susceptibility to disease to the volunteer service he did during medical school at an isolated mining town in northern Surinam, where he delivered babies, performed clinical services and undertook the first malaria survey done in that region.
He was particularly interested in the sugar plantation workers who had been imported from several continents.
“Hindus from India, Javanese, Africans (including the Djukas, descendants of rebelled slaves who resided in autonomous kingdoms in the interior), Chinese, and a smattering of Jews descended from 17th century migrants to the country from Brazil, lived side by side,” Dr. Blumberg wrote in his Nobel essay. “Their responses to the many infectious agents in the environment were very different.”
He wrote his first scientific paper based on these studies and would revisit the tropics repeatedly. “Nature operates in bold and dramatic manner in the tropics,” he wrote.
By the late 1990s Dr. Blumberg was immersed in astrobiology, as NASA called the new science. Appointed by the NASA administrator, Dan Goldin, to lead the Astrobiology Institute, Dr. Blumberg and his team were asked to address three profound questions: How does life begin and evolve? Does life exist elsewhere in the universe? And what is life’s future on Earth and beyond?
As in his disease studies, Dr. Blumberg sought collaborations with specialists in a variety of fields, including physics, chemistry, geology, paleontology and oceanography as well as biology and medicine that would “help us to recognize biospheres that might be different from our own.”
While urging the development of instrumentation for astrobiological space probes, Dr. Blumberg recommended equal efforts in the study of earthly “extremophiles,” the organisms that somehow thrive in extreme temperatures, pressures and chemical conditions.
In fissures in the deep ocean floor, Dr. Blumberg said, are extremophiles that might resemble the earliest life forms on Earth or other planets. He described Earth as “a place of extremes” during the first few hundred million years of its 4.5-billion-year existence, given to radical climate fluctuations, from searing heat to immobilizing cold, amid constant meteorite bombardments and catastrophic volcanic eruptions.
He speculated that life might have started on Earth at geothermal sites, either underground or in the sea. The NASA venture — since diminished by administrative changes and financing cutbacks — was welcomed by those who advocate a search for extraterrestrial intelligence, known as SETI, and call the science “exobiology.” Dr. Blumberg joined the board of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif.
But in an interview with The New York Times in 2002, he said he would be “very surprised if we found something in space, that it would look like E.T.”
“If we found something more like a virus or a bacteria,” he said, “that would be astounding enough.”
Baruch Samuel Blumberg (Barry to his friends) was born in New York City on July 28, 1925, the second of three children of Meyer Blumberg, a lawyer, and Ida Blumberg. After attending the Yeshiva of Flatbush in Brooklyn, he went to Far Rockaway High School in Queens (whose graduates also include the Nobel physicists Richard Feynman and Burton Richter).
His undergraduate studies at Union College in Schenectady, N.Y., were interrupted by World War II, when he served as a Navy deck officer on landing ships. Returning to Union College, he completed a bachelor’s degree in physics, enrolled in graduate studies of mathematics at Columbia and transferred to Columbia’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, earning his M.D. there in 1951.
Dr. Blumberg served a clinical fellowship at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center, went to Oxford University’s Balliol College for a doctorate in biochemistry, and returned to the United States in 1957 to join the National Institutes of Health, where he headed the Geographic Medicine and Genetics Section until 1964.
Most of his research afterward was conducted at the Fox Chase Cancer Center. Dr. Blumberg was also on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania and its School of Medicine as a professor of medicine, medical genetics and medical anthropology.
Dr. Blumberg married Jean Liebesman, an artist, in 1954. She survives him, as do two daughters, Anne Blumberg of Boston and Jane Blumberg of Oxford, England; two sons, George, of Oxford, and Noah, of Chevy Chase, Md.; and nine grandchildren.
Dr. Blumberg saw his Nobel as more than an act of recognition. He said it helped draw renewed attention to his work with enormously beneficial consequences. After receiving the prize, he said, he was invited to China. “I spoke before several thousand people,” he told The Times in 2002. “I provided them with a copy of the patent, and now I’m told that it helped to change the direction of what they were doing and led to the saving of a lot of lives.”
Saving lives, he said, was the whole point of his career. “Well, it is something I always wanted to do,” he said. “This is what drew me to medicine. There is, in Jewish thought, this idea that if you save a single life, you save the whole world, and that affected me.”
Dr. Baruch S. Blumberg, the Nobel Prize-winning biochemist and medical anthropologist who discovered the hepatitis B virus, showed that it could cause liver cancer and then helped develop a powerful vaccine to fight it, saving millions of lives, died Tuesday in Moffett Field, Calif. He was 85 and lived in Philadelphia.
His family said he died, apparently of a heart attack, shortly after giving a keynote speech at a NASA conference at the Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, which is in the San Francisco Bay area. Dr. Blumberg had long been associated with a NASA project to hunt for micro-organisms in space.
Dr. Blumberg’s prize-winning virology and epidemiology work began in the 1960s at the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia and took him and his colleagues on field trips around the world, from Japan to Africa.
The work led to the discovery of the hepatitis B virus in 1967, the first test for hepatitis B in the blood supply and the development in 1969 of the hepatitis B vaccine — the first “cancer vaccine.” Dr. Irving Millman, a colleague at the research center, was its co-creator.
Dr. Blumberg’s discoveries have been compared to those of Jonas Salk, the developer of the polio vaccine. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1976 with D. Carleton Gajdusek for their work on the origins and spread of infectious viral diseases. (Dr. Gajdusek had discovered the cause of the kuru, or “trembling disease,” prevalent in New Guinea.)
Almost 20 years later, after decades of hepatitis B-related studies and a global search for medicinal plants to treat hepatic infections, Dr. Blumberg began what he called his second career. In 1999 he became the founding director of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Astrobiology Institute.
The institute’s mission was to oversee research teams in the development of life-detecting devices for planetary rovers and asteroid fly-bys, and to scrutinize life forms in “extreme” environments on Earth, like the ocean bottom and the geothermal cauldrons that produce geysers. He joined several expeditions himself.
To these seemingly disparate endeavors — investigating disease-causing organisms and postulating alien or primordial life forms — Dr. Blumberg contributed a broadened understanding of the evolutionary phenomenon called polymorphism, in which a species can adapt to an environment through changes in appearances and functions.
From his base in Philadelphia, Dr. Blumberg began investigating viruses with a study of yellow jaundice, so named because of the characteristic vivid yellowing of the eyes and skin. As early as 1940, medical researchers had determined that there were two different forms of virus-induced jaundice, one that is transmitted as an intestinal infection, and the other spread mainly by blood transfusions.
Scientific field trips to pinpoint the agent responsible for blood-borne jaundice were conducted by Dr. Blumberg and his colleagues in the Philippines, India, Japan, Canada, Scandinavia, Australia and Africa. Ultimately it was blood serum from an infected Australian aborigine that yielded the so-called Australian antigen, a protein found on the surface of the hepatitis B virus.
After he and Dr. Millman developed the hepatitis vaccine, they struggled to interest a pharmaceutical company to help develop and produce it.
“Vaccines are not an attractive product for pharmaceutical companies in that they are often used once or only a few times and they ordinarily do not generate as much income as a medication for a chronic disease that must be used for many years,” Dr. Blumberg wrote in an autobiographical essay for the Nobel committee.
Moreover, he said, the medical research community in the early 1970s remained skeptical about the claim that a virus had been identified and a vaccine developed.
Ultimately he and Dr. Millman signed an agreement with Merck & Company, whose vaccine laboratories were near Philadelphia.
Dr. Blumberg’s discoveries are credited with saving millions of patients from ever developing liver cancer. But in his scientific autobiography, “Hepatitis B: The Hunt for a Killer Virus” (Princeton University Press, 2002), he observed ruefully that hepatic disease was still killing 1.5 million people a year worldwide — despite the widespread availability of the vaccines he helped develop — and that 350 million were chronically infected.
Still, he was hopeful. “Life — and death — are full of surprises,” he wrote, “and while it may be tempting fate to be too optimistic, it appears likely that within the next few decades this virus will be effectively controlled.” (There is still no vaccine for the blood-borne hepatitis C, one of the five known hepatitis viruses.)
Dr. Blumberg’s traced his fascination with inherited variations in susceptibility to disease to the volunteer service he did during medical school at an isolated mining town in northern Surinam, where he delivered babies, performed clinical services and undertook the first malaria survey done in that region.
He was particularly interested in the sugar plantation workers who had been imported from several continents.
“Hindus from India, Javanese, Africans (including the Djukas, descendants of rebelled slaves who resided in autonomous kingdoms in the interior), Chinese, and a smattering of Jews descended from 17th century migrants to the country from Brazil, lived side by side,” Dr. Blumberg wrote in his Nobel essay. “Their responses to the many infectious agents in the environment were very different.”
He wrote his first scientific paper based on these studies and would revisit the tropics repeatedly. “Nature operates in bold and dramatic manner in the tropics,” he wrote.
By the late 1990s Dr. Blumberg was immersed in astrobiology, as NASA called the new science. Appointed by the NASA administrator, Dan Goldin, to lead the Astrobiology Institute, Dr. Blumberg and his team were asked to address three profound questions: How does life begin and evolve? Does life exist elsewhere in the universe? And what is life’s future on Earth and beyond?
As in his disease studies, Dr. Blumberg sought collaborations with specialists in a variety of fields, including physics, chemistry, geology, paleontology and oceanography as well as biology and medicine that would “help us to recognize biospheres that might be different from our own.”
While urging the development of instrumentation for astrobiological space probes, Dr. Blumberg recommended equal efforts in the study of earthly “extremophiles,” the organisms that somehow thrive in extreme temperatures, pressures and chemical conditions.
In fissures in the deep ocean floor, Dr. Blumberg said, are extremophiles that might resemble the earliest life forms on Earth or other planets. He described Earth as “a place of extremes” during the first few hundred million years of its 4.5-billion-year existence, given to radical climate fluctuations, from searing heat to immobilizing cold, amid constant meteorite bombardments and catastrophic volcanic eruptions.
He speculated that life might have started on Earth at geothermal sites, either underground or in the sea. The NASA venture — since diminished by administrative changes and financing cutbacks — was welcomed by those who advocate a search for extraterrestrial intelligence, known as SETI, and call the science “exobiology.” Dr. Blumberg joined the board of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif.
But in an interview with The New York Times in 2002, he said he would be “very surprised if we found something in space, that it would look like E.T.”
“If we found something more like a virus or a bacteria,” he said, “that would be astounding enough.”
Baruch Samuel Blumberg (Barry to his friends) was born in New York City on July 28, 1925, the second of three children of Meyer Blumberg, a lawyer, and Ida Blumberg. After attending the Yeshiva of Flatbush in Brooklyn, he went to Far Rockaway High School in Queens (whose graduates also include the Nobel physicists Richard Feynman and Burton Richter).
His undergraduate studies at Union College in Schenectady, N.Y., were interrupted by World War II, when he served as a Navy deck officer on landing ships. Returning to Union College, he completed a bachelor’s degree in physics, enrolled in graduate studies of mathematics at Columbia and transferred to Columbia’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, earning his M.D. there in 1951.
Dr. Blumberg served a clinical fellowship at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center, went to Oxford University’s Balliol College for a doctorate in biochemistry, and returned to the United States in 1957 to join the National Institutes of Health, where he headed the Geographic Medicine and Genetics Section until 1964.
Most of his research afterward was conducted at the Fox Chase Cancer Center. Dr. Blumberg was also on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania and its School of Medicine as a professor of medicine, medical genetics and medical anthropology.
Dr. Blumberg married Jean Liebesman, an artist, in 1954. She survives him, as do two daughters, Anne Blumberg of Boston and Jane Blumberg of Oxford, England; two sons, George, of Oxford, and Noah, of Chevy Chase, Md.; and nine grandchildren.
Dr. Blumberg saw his Nobel as more than an act of recognition. He said it helped draw renewed attention to his work with enormously beneficial consequences. After receiving the prize, he said, he was invited to China. “I spoke before several thousand people,” he told The Times in 2002. “I provided them with a copy of the patent, and now I’m told that it helped to change the direction of what they were doing and led to the saving of a lot of lives.”
Saving lives, he said, was the whole point of his career. “Well, it is something I always wanted to do,” he said. “This is what drew me to medicine. There is, in Jewish thought, this idea that if you save a single life, you save the whole world, and that affected me.”
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