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Keynote Address: The Australia Antigen Story

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Hepatitis B
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Abstract

I would like to welcome visitors to Philadelphia and remind them that we are in the midst of celebrating our 300th birthday and looking forward to our fourth century as a thriving city. For the past year the city has undertaken an orgy of reminiscences and the commemoration of historic events. Philadelphia is gifted in preserving and recalling its past, and we would like to think that we are also interested in the development of an exciting future. All this historical reminiscing may provide an adequate excuse to look back at the work that we have done at the Institute for Cancer Research over the past 18 years which led to the discovery of the hepatitis B virus, the invention of the vaccine to protect against it, the possibility of prevention of primary cancer of the liver, and the many developments in our knowledge of this interesting virus. I hope that our extended discussion of the past won’t detract from an interest in our current work, to which I will also refer briefly.

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Blumberg, B.S. (1984). Keynote Address: The Australia Antigen Story. In: Millman, I., Eisenstein, T.K., Blumberg, B.S. (eds) Hepatitis B. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-0369-3_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-0369-3_2

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