Harold Ginsberg, who has died aged 85, was a micro-biologist with an international reputation in research and teaching. His studies of viruses gave a better insight into a range of infectious diseases and provided signposts that other scientists needed to investigate the development of vaccines. He helped formulate US public health policy to prevent the spread of Aids, and worked tirelessly to counter the confusion caused by those who maintained that the human immuno-deficiency virus (HIV) was not the cause of Aids.
Born in Daytona Beach, Florida, Ginsberg took his BSc at Duke University, North Carolina, and his medical degree at Tulane University medical school, Louisiana. His first important discovery came while he was working at a US army hospital in England during the second world war.
He noticed that a large number of soldiers contracted hepatitis following blood transfusions, and realised that contamination of the hospital's pooled plasma was a source of hepatitis-B. Other research showed the same risk occurred with fibrinogen, factor VIII concentrate and vaccines contaminated with human serum, and is the reason why, today, all blood donors are examined to check for hepatitis-B carriers.
The US army awarded Ginsberg its Legion of Merit Award in 1945 for this work, which was done before the discovery of the complexity of hepatitis and the full range of viruses involved.
After military service, he became a research associate at the Rockefeller Institute, New York, for five years. In 1952, he moved to a teaching and research post at Case Western University, and worked on adenoviruses.
There are a large number of different types, several of which are the source of serious respiratory disease. Ginsberg suggested how some types can lie dormant in the adenoid tissue at the back of the nose before becoming infectious and mimicking influenza, and he showed that common childhood infections, such as atypical pneumonia and pharyngitis, were caused by adenoviruses.
He became head of the microbiology department at the University of Pennsylvania, and was then at Columbia University from 1973 to 1985.
Ginsberg concentrated his research on precisely how viruses invaded their host cells and caused disease. His work on characterising the genes and proteins from which adenoviruses were formed helped other scientists pinpoint the viral agents they wanted to implant in healthy genes, to treat people with cystic fibrosis and other inherited diseases.
Later, he worked at the US national institute of allergy and infectious diseases, where he studied the simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) and the equivalent of Aids that it caused in monkeys. He hoped the work might provide information to produce a vaccine against SIV, which, in turn, would provide a model to pursue a vaccine against HIV.
Ginsberg received numerous scientific awards and was a member of the US national academy of sciences. A prolific writer, he was the author or co-author of several books, including a widely used microbiology text. He published more than 200 scientific papers.
He is survived by his wife of 53 years, Marion, and two sons and two daughters.
· Harold Ginsberg, microbiologist, born May 27 1917; died February 2 2003
