Baruch Samuel Blumberg  received his M.D. degree from Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1951and completed his internship and residency at Bellevue and Presbyterian hospitals in New York.

In 1955 Baruch Blumberg won a fellowship to Balliol College, Oxford University, working toward a Ph.D. in biochemistry. His specific field of interest was hyaluronic acid, one of the major constituents of connective tissue, synovial fluid and the vitreous humor of the eyes. In 1957 he received his doctorate and was also hard at work on research on response to disease, which led him later to win the Nobel Prize.

As a medical student working in Surinam and South America, Blumberg had become interested in the manner in which various ethnic groups respond to disease and infection. This triggered him a very simple question: why do some people get sick while others do not? It was this question that increasingly guided his work, even while at Oxford. Epidemiologists had already speculated that an answer to this question might lie in the blood, and more specifically in the variations of genetically reproduced proteins in the blood. To study such polymorphisms would necessitate a large variety of bloodsamples from around the world, and this is why on his return from England, Baruch Blumberg enrolled as chief of the geographic medicine and genetics section of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). From 1957 to 1964, he traveled from Alaska to Africa, from Australia to South America and Europe.

Professor Blumberg research concentrated on patients who had received multiple transfusions and produce antibodies other than those inherited. It is on this line of work that he found, in 1963, the Australia antigen, that he later linked to hepatitis B, in 1966. In that same year, the Australia antigen was identified as part of the virus itself and was renamed hepatitis B virus antigen.

In the 1970s, Blumberg, developed a vaccine from the sera of patients with hepatitis B virus antigen which prevents hepatitis B infection. This became commercially available in 1982, and has been ever since successfully used on a very large scale.

Professor Blumberg work has also shown that chronic infection with hepatitis B virus may cause liver cancer, the most common form of cancer in males in Asia, India and Africa. The discovery of a vaccine against the disease has therefore reduce the risk of primary liver cancer. Mass vaccinations of newborns have been undertaken in some Asian and African nations to that effect.

In 1964 Blumberg became associate director of clinical research of the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia and has held the rank of University Professor of Medicine and Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania since 1977.

He also served as Master of Balliol College from 1989 to 1994.

From 1999 to 2002, he was also director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute at the Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, California.

As a recognition of his worldwide and outstanding scientific contribution Professor Baruch Blumberg received the 1976 Nobel Prize in Medicine, along with D. Carleton Gajdusek, for “discoveries concerning new mechanisms for the origin and dissemination of infectious diseases.”

Other honors he received along his career include the Eppger Prize from the University of Freiburg (1973), the Distinguished Achievement Award in Modern Medicine (1975), the Gairdner Foundation International Award (1975), the Governor's Award in the Sciences from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (1988), and the Gold Medal Award from the Canadian Liver Foundation (1990).