Karl Landsteiner
Biographical facts
From Nobel
Lectures, Physiology or Medicine 1922-1941, Elsevier Publishing
Company, Amsterdam, 1965
Karl Landsteiner was born
in Vienna on June 14, 1868. His father, Leopold Landsteiner, a doctor of law,
was a well-known journalist and newspaper publisher, who died when Karl was six
years old. Karl was brought up by his mother, Fanny Hess, to whom he was so
devoted that a death mask of her hung on his wall until he died. After leaving
school, Landsteiner studied medicine at the University of Vienna, graduating in
1891. Even while he was a student, he had begun to do biochemical research and
in 1891, he published a paper on the influence of diet on the composition of
blood ash. To gain further knowledge of chemistry he spent the next five years
in the laboratories of Hantzsch at Zurich, Emil Fischer at Wurzburg, and E.
Bamberger at Munich.
Returning to Vienna,
Landsteiner resumed his medical studies at the Vienna General Hospital. In 1896,
he became an assistant under Max von Gruber in the Hygiene Institute at Vienna.
Even at this time, he was interested in the mechanisms of immunity and in the
nature of antibodies. From 1898 till 1908 he held the post of assistant in the
University Department of Pathological Anatomy in Vienna, the Head of which was
Professor A. Weichselbaum, who had discovered the bacterial cause of
meningitis, and with Fraenckel had discovered the pneumococcus. Here
Landsteiner worked on morbid physiology rather than on morbid anatomy. In this,
he was encouraged by Weichselbaum, in spite of the criticism of others in this
Institute. In 1908 Weichselbaum secured his appointment as Prosector in the
Wilhelminaspital in Vienna, where he remained until 1919. In 1911, he became
Professor of Pathological Anatomy in the University of Vienna, but without the
corresponding salary.
Up to the year 1919, after
twenty years of work on pathological anatomy, Landsteiner with a number of
collaborators had published many papers on his findings in morbid anatomy and
on immunology. He discovered new facts about the immunology of syphilis, added
to the knowledge of the Wassermann reaction, and discovered the immunological factors,
which he named happens (it then became clear that the active substances in the
extracts of normal organs used in this reaction were, in fact, haptens). He
made fundamental contributions to our knowledge of paroxysmal haemoglobinuria.
He also showed that the
cause of poliomyelitis could be transmitted to monkeys by injecting into them
material prepared by grinding up the spinal cords of children who had died from
this disease, and, lacking in Vienna monkeys for further experiments, he went
to the Pasteur Institute in Paris, where monkeys were available. His work
there, together with that independently done by Flexner and Lewis, laid the
foundations of our knowledge of the cause and immunology of poliomyelitis.
Landsteiner contributed to
both pathological anatomy, histology and immunology, all of which showed, not
only his meticulous care in observation and description, but also his
biological understanding. But his name will no doubt always be honoured for his
discovery in 1901 of, and outstanding work on, the blood groups, for which he
was given the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1930.
In 1875 Landois had
reported that, when man is given transfusions of the blood of other animals,
these foreign blood corpuscles are clumped and broken up in the blood vessels
of man with the liberation of haemoglobin. In 1901-1903 Landsteiner pointed out
that a similar reaction may occur when the blood of one human individual is
transfused, not with the blood of another animal, but with that of another
human being, and that this might be the cause of shock, jaundice, and
haemoglobinuria that had followed some earlier attempts at blood transfusions.
 |
| Starts use transfusions |
His suggestions, however,
received little attention until, in 1909, he classified the bloods of human
beings into the now well-known A, B, AB, and O groups and showed that
transfusions between individuals of groups A or B do not result in the
destruction of new blood cells and that this catastrophe occurs only when a
person is transfused with the blood of a person belonging to a different group.
Earlier, in 1901-1903, Landsteiner had suggested that, because the characteristics,
which determine the blood groups, are inherited the blood groups may be used to
decide instances of doubtful paternity. Much of the subsequent work that
Landsteiner and his pupils did on blood groups and the immunological uses they
made of them was done, not in Vienna, but in New York. For in 1919 conditions
in Vienna were such that laboratory work was very difficult and, seeing no
future for Austria, Landsteiner obtained the appointment of Prosecutors to a
small Roman Catholic Hospital at The Hague. Here he published, from 1919-1922,
twelve papers on new happens that he had discovered, on conjugates with
proteins which were capable of inducing anaphylaxis and on related problems,
and also on the serological specificity of the haemoglobins of different
species of animals. His work in Holland ended when he was offered a post in the
Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York and he moved there
together with his family. It was here that he did, in collaboration with Levine
and Wiener, the further work on the blood groups, which greatly extended the
number of these groups, and here in collaboration with Wiener studied bleeding
in the new-born, leading to the discovery of the Rh-factor in blood, which
relates the human blood to the blood of the rhesus monkey.
To the end of his life,
Landsteiner continued to investigate blood groups and the chemistry of
antigens, antibodies and other immunological factors that occur in the blood.
It was one of his great merits that he introduced chemistry into the service of
serology.
Rigorously exacting in the
demands he made upon himself, Landsteiner possessed untiring energy. Throughout
his life he was always making observations in many fields other than those in
which his main work was done (he was, for instance, responsible for having
introduced dark-field illumination in the study of spirochaetes). By nature
somewhat pessimistic, he preferred to live away from people.
Landsteiner married Helen
Wlasto in 1916. Dr. E. Landsteiner is a son by this marriage.
In 1939, he became Emeritus
Professor at the Rockefeller Institute, but continued to work as energetically
as before, keeping eagerly in touch with the progress of science. It is
characteristic of him that he died pipette in hand. On June 24, 1943, he had a
heart attack in his laboratory and died two days later in the hospital of the
Institute in which he had done such distinguished work.
Karl
Landsteiner died on June 26, 1943.
With
affection,
Ruben
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