A Journey of Inquiry: Exploring the Scientific Process through the Manuscript Collection of Baruch S. Blumberg

This digital gallery was created by the Center for Digital Scholarship.

Baruch S. Blumberg led a varied life full of unexpected adventure and discovery: from a medical residency at Bellevue Hospital in New York to working in a small field clinic in a mining village in South America or from serving in the U.S. Navy toward the end of World War Two to becoming the first director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute. The pinnacle of this journey was his discovery of the hepatitis B virus, for which he won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1976, and the creation of a vaccine. Having lived such a full life, he left a voluminous manuscript collection. This exhibition is but a small snippet designed to highlight the influence of the philosophy of science that coursed through his scientific career, ever moving between the forefront and background, whether he was contemplating the structure and process of the scientific method or hard at work formulating hypotheses and experiments.