Summary: In This Episode: Just how much impact one person can have by refusing to be stymied by those who don’t have it. Because he did that, you might owe this guy your life.<br> <br> <a class="twitter-share-button" href="https://twitter.com/share?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">Tweet</a><br> <a href="#transcript">Jump to Transcript</a><br> <a href="https://thisistrue.com/category/podcasts/">How to Subscribe and List of All Episodes</a><br> Show Notes<br> <br> * Much of my research on Dr. Blumberg is from a 2015 <a href="https://sservi.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Barry-Tribute-Article-Final.pdf">paper</a> for the journal Astrobiology by Dr. Carl Pilcher, who was the Director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute from 2006 to 2016.<br> * There are several photos in the transcript, below.<br> <br> <a name="transcript"></a><br> Transcript<br> I’d like to tell you another story of Uncommon Sense that shows just how much impact one person can have by refusing to be stymied by those who don’t have it. The hero of this story is named Barry Blumberg, who was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1925. … And you may very well owe him your life.<br> Welcome to Uncommon Sense, I’m Randy Cassingham.<br> In college, Baruch Samuel Blumberg, who preferred to be called Barry, was interested in math and physics. But World War II interrupted his studies: he served in the U.S. Navy, eventually rising to be the captain of his own small amphibious ship. In the Navy, Blumberg learned responsibility, logistics and infrastructure, and planning — and not just planning but, it being wartime and all, always having a contingency plan ready too. Which came in handy: His motto: “Expect the unexpected,” and indeed you can expect that what Blumberg did was quite unexpected.<br> After his discharge, he used his G.I. Bill benefits to attend Union College in Schenectady, where he graduated with honors in 1946. But he had learned that he wasn’t quite suited for physics, so he moved on to Columbia’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, where he received his doctorate in medicine in 1951. He stayed in New York to get through his internship and residency, during which time he went on medical research missions to Dutch Guiana (now known as Suriname), the Basque region of Spain, Nigeria, Greece, islands in the Pacific, Mexico, South America, and the American arctic.<br> These experiences were giving him an idea. He was intrigued by “questions of diversity in relation to disease stimulated by my [internship] experiences at Bellevue [Hospital] and in the jungle hospital in Suriname,” he wrote years later. “Of particular interest are inherited differences among individuals and populations that result in differential disease susceptibility,” he continued, “because these can often be detected before the person is exposed to [a] disease hazard. It was this notion that became the driving force in our research. If we could precisely identify the susceptibility factors before a person became sick, then we might be able to intervene to prevent the illness. The idea of a disease-free life — or, to be more realistic, a life with less disease — might be possible.”<br> This was decades before “preventative medicine” took the prominence it has today, so he’s already a forward, outside-the-box thinker, one of the markers of Uncommon Sense.<br> To further his research ideas, Blumberg studied at Balliol College of Oxford University in England, and earned his Ph.D in biochemistry in 1957.<br> Dr. Blumberg had a lot of interests, as you might be starting to gather. He liked to think of himself as an explorer: his heroes included evolutionary biologist Charles Darw...
