Hematologist, bacteriologist, Nobel Prize laureate, discoverer of the basic human blood groups
Karl Landsteiner was born in Vienna, where he studied medicine. From 1898 to 1908 he served as professor of pathological anatomy at the University of Vienna. Thereafter he taught pathology for ten years at the University’s Wilhelminenspital and then spent three years in Holland.
In 1922 he immigrated New York and became a member of the Rockefeller Institution for Medical Research where he worked for the rest of his life. His most important discovery (1911) is the Iso-Agglutination, which enabled him to define the four blood groups: A, B, AB, and O. For this revelation, setting the ground for transfusion of matching blood types from donor to recipient, he received the Nobel Prize in 1930. His second important discovery (together with Prof. Alexander S. Wiener) is the so-called Rhesus-Factor, which endangered many new-born babies by massive bleeding. This discovery saved numerous affected children by transfusion of negative Rhesus blood. In 1927, together with Philip Levine, Landsteiner described the M, N, and P factors in human blood. These hereditary factors were later used to determine cases of doubtful paternity. Landsteiner also introduced darkfield illumination for demonstrating spirochetes in syphilitic lesions and discovered that the Rhesus monkey could be infected by the poliomyelitis virus. This finding was the basis for the later development of the Salk vaccine. Landsteiner’s book The Specificity of Serological Reaction (1936) has become a classic.
Landsteiner converted to the Catholic Church and died in New York, in 1943.