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University of Vienna
Karl Landsteiner, ForMemRS[1] (June 14, 1868 – June 26, 1943), was an Austrian biologist and physician.[2] He is noted for having first distinguished the main blood groups in 1900, having developed the modern system of classification of blood groups from his identification of the presence of agglutinins in the blood, and having identified, with Alexander S. Wiener, the Rhesus factor, in 1937, thus enabling physicians to transfuse blood without endangering the patient′s life. With Constantin Levaditi and Erwin Popper, he discovered the polio virus, in 1909. In 1930 he received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. He was awarded a Lasker Award in 1946 posthumously and is recognized as the father of transfusion medicine.
Landsteiner’s father, Leopold (1818–1875), a renowned Viennese journalist who was editor-in-chief of Die Presse, died at age 56, when Karl was only 6. This led to a close relationship between Landsteiner and his mother Fanny (née Hess; 1837–1908). After graduating with the Matura exam from a Vienna secondary school, he took up the study of medicine at the University of Vienna and wrote his doctoral thesis in 1891. While still a student he published an essay on the influence of diets on the composition of blood.
From 1891 to 1893, Landsteiner studied chemistry in Würzburg under Hermann Emil Fischer, in München under Eugen Bamberger and in Zürich under Arthur Rudolf Hantzsch. A number of publications from that period, some of them in co-operation with his professors, show that he did not restrict himself to hearing lectures.[3]
Prof. Landsteiner had to endure continual hardships in Europe until he was invited to accept a position at the Rockefeller Institute in the United States, where he could conduct his scientific research and openly practice Judaism, undisturbed.
After returning to Vienna he became an assistant to Warm Springs, Georgia, which was dedicated in January 1958.
In 1900 Karl Landsteiner found out that the blood of two people under contact agglutinates, and in 1901 he found that this effect was due to contact of blood with blood serum. As a result he succeeded in identifying the three blood groups A, B and O, which he labelled C, of human blood. Landsteiner also found out that blood transfusion between persons with the same blood group did not lead to the destruction of blood cells, whereas this occurred between persons of different blood groups.[6] Based on his findings, in 1907 the first successful blood transfusion was performed by Reuben Ottenberg at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York.
Today it is well known that persons with blood group AB can accept donations of the other blood groups, and that persons with blood group O can donate to all other groups. Individuals with blood group AB are referred to as universal recipients and those with blood group O are known as universal donors. These donor-recipient relationships arise due to the fact that persons with AB do not form antibodies against either blood group A or B. Further, because type O blood possesses neither characteristic A nor B, the immune systems of persons with blood group AB do not refuse the donation. In today’s blood transfusions only concentrates of red blood cells without serum are transmitted, which is of great importance in surgical practice. In 1930 Landsteiner was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in recognition of these achievements. For his pioneering work, he is recognised as the father of transfusion medicine.[7]
After World War I, Vienna and the new republic of Austria as a whole was in a desolate economic state, a situation in which Landsteiner did not see any possibilities to carry on with his research work. He decided to move to Holland and accepted a post as prosector in the small Catholic Ziekenhuis hospital in The Hague and, in order to improve his financial situation also took a job in a small factory, producing old tuberculin (tuberculinum prestinum).[8] He also published a number of papers, five of them being published in Dutch by the Royal Academy of Sciences. Yet working conditions proved to be not much better than in post-war Vienna. So Landsteiner accepted the inivitation that reached him from New York, initiated by Simon Flexner, who was familiar with Landsteiner's work, to work for the Rockefeller Institute. With his family he arrived there in the spring of 1923.. Throughout the 1920s Landsteiner worked on the problems of immunity and allergy. In 1927 he discovered new blood groups: M, N and P, refining the work he had begun 20 years before. Soon after Landsteiner and his collaborator, Philip Levine, published the work and, in 1927, the types began to be used in paternity suits.
In the field of bacteriology, Landsteiner and Clara Nigg succeeded in 1930–1932 in culturing Rickettsia prowazekii, the causative agent of typhus, on living media.
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