Chemicals, it turned out, were not the only carcinogens; nor was Ames’s test the only method to find such agents. In the late 1960s, Baruch Blumberg, a biologist working in Philadelphia, discovered that a chronic, smoldering inflammation caused by a human hepatitis virus could also cause cancer. A biochemistry student at Oxford718 in the 1950s, Blumberg719 had become interested in genetic anthropology, the study of genetic variations in human populations. Traditional biological anthropology in the 1950s mainly involved collecting, measuring, and categorizing human anatomical specimens.
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