Baruch Blumberg, a Nobel-prize winner who discovered hepatitis B and led NASA’s efforts to find life on other planets, died yesterday, aged 85. He suffered an apparent heart attack in California, while attending a NASA conference at the agency’s Ames Research Center.

Blumberg served as the first director of NASA’s Astrobiology Institute between 1999 and 2002, however he is best known for his work on infectious disease. In 1976, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering hepatitis B and showing how the virus causes liver disease.

In the 1960s, Blumberg found a mysterious blood protein in Australian aboriginals who had received transfusions and developed jaundice. The protein, which he named Australia antigen, turned out to be a surface protein of hepatitis B. Nature published much of Blumberg’s work on Australia antigen, as well as numerous other papers of his.

In a 2008 obituary for Joshua Lederberg in Nature, Blumberg said he had a lot in common with his long-time friend: “We were born in the same year, spent much of our youthful spare time in branches of the New York Public Library, and were prompted to enter medical research by reading Paul de Kruif’s Microbe Hunters.”

Image courtesy NASA/Tom Trower