To hear more of Baruch Blumberg’s stories, go to the playlist: [ Ссылка ]
The late Baruch Blumberg (1925-2011) was an American scientist and doctor whose most significant contributions to medicine include the identification of the Hepatitis B virus. He was one of three co-recipients of the 1976 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. [Listener: Rebecca Blanchard; date recorded: 2007]
TRANSCRIPT: That's on our turf, so to speak, you know, I only live two or three blocks away, so I've known it for a long time. And I was… I was elected a member in the 1980s, I think, you know, I've been a member for quite a long time. But I, you know, I've been busy, pretty busy doing other things, and although I have a great admiration for people who take a role in organized scientific association — I think it's very important, you know, the maintenance of these things — I've never kind of aspired to be an officer of, you know, the Genetics Society or the Human Genetics, so although I was involved when it was early set up, I… I'm not terribly good at committee meetings, you know, I tend to get restless sitting down, and, you know, a lot of it's not… but nevertheless, it's important. But, the Philosophical Society is, you know, a very unusual organization. It was founded pretty much by Benjamin Franklin and… and many of his friends, and our date of formation is usually given as 1763. 17… yeah, '43… '43, okay. And it… it's had a long history, but it's survived. Well, in the... just after the Revolution in the early Federal period, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania deeded us a footprint of our clubhouse, in the late 1780s, early 1790s, I believe, and we're still there. You know, the building's still there. It's right next to Independence Hall. That was the Pennsylvania legislature, and we're right next to the... what was the Pennsylvanian Supreme Court. And we have been there ever since. And we've acquired several other buildings; we have a library that's right across the street. And that was the location of the Library Company of Philadelphia, also founded by Benjamin Franklin. And they moved to another location, a very grand building down on Broad Street, and then subsequently elsewhere. But we… we are tenants of the Park Service, on that piece of property and we built a replica, a façade; there's a replica of the Library Company building. And it's a wonderful library; we have a fantastic archive — Thomas Jefferson's draft of the Declaration of Independence, that, sort of poetic, founding paper of ours. That was our… that was, kind of, our vision statement for the country, you know, that set off the broad objectives. And the Constitution was our, kind of, rule-based, legal-based document. We own that; we have a lot of Benjamin Franklin's papers. We have the largest collection of Darwin papers, outside of Cambridge, England… we have a lot of stuff from early explorers.
Actually, one of the things, well then, every so often they elect officers; they’re usually, in a funny way, non-contested. There's a nominating committee and they kind of look at who's around. You know, who's had... has interest in the club, and who has, you know, and very often, you know, the average age of members is 76. It's not getting much younger. We've increased our number of women; we have, considerably, over time… time, and it was never... one of our earlier members was… was a woman. She was a friend of Benjamin Franklin's and was nominated by him. And she... her name was Princess Dashkova, and she was the President of the, sort of, Academy of Sciences of Russia, under, at the time of Catherine the Great. She was a political ally of Catherine the Great, so she was given this prestigious post. But apparently, she was a very intelligent, very bright woman. And Franklin met her when he lived in Paris, met her once, but he was so impressed that he, you know, nominated her by mail, by post, and she was elected. So she was our first woman member in the 18th century. We didn't have another one for 60 years. But, in any case, that's changed now. But we, what we do, is we have meetings which are really wonderful; I mean the meetings, and they're heterogeneous; there's science, a lot of stuff on law, history, art.
