Tom Trower (NASA) · Public domain

Blumberg identified the hepatitis B virus while researching at the NIH, then went on to develop both the diagnostic test for it and the vaccine that has since prevented millions of infections and the liver cancers hepatitis B can cause. He shared the 1976 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Daniel Carleton Gajdusek for discovering new mechanisms behind how infectious diseases originate and spread. He later served as president of the American Philosophical Society.