(Order of authorship in the original publication: Blumberg, Alter, Visnich.) Discovery of Australia antigen, hepatitis B antigen, Aa, later called HBsAg.  Blumberg received half of the Nobel Prize for Medicine in Biology in 1976 for the discovery of the antigen, for discovery of the hepatitis B virus, and for the discovery/ invention of the hepatitis B vaccine— the first cancer vaccine.  See B. S. Blumberg, Hepatitis B: The Hunt for a Killer Virus (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002.)

The first paper recording the discovery of what was, eleven years later in 1989, named the hepatitis C virus (see No. 12653). Harvey Alter and colleagues inoculated the serum/plasma of 4 patients with non-A/non-B hepatitis into 5 chimps, and the chimps showed both biochemical and histological evidence of a typical hepatitis. The experiment was performed with a negative control. Order of authorship in the original paper: Alter, Purcell, Holland....

In 2020 Alter shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Michael Houghton and Charles M. Rice "for the discovery of Hepatitis C virus."

(Thanks to Juan Weiss for this reference and its interpretation.)