Author: Baruch S. Blumberg
About 375 million people are infected with the
hepatitis B virus. It has killed more people than AIDS and also causes millions of cases of liver cancer. The discovery of this deadly virus and the vaccine against it-a vaccine that is sharply decreasing the infection rate worldwide and is probably the first effective cancer vaccine-was one of the great triumphs of
twentieth-century medicine. And it almost didn't happen.With wit and insight, this scientific memoir and story of discovery describes how Baruch Blumberg and a team of researchers found a virus they were not looking for and created a vaccine for a disease they previously knew little about-work that took the author around the world…
