Karl Landsteiner Facts
Karl Landsteiner Facts
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| Interesting Karl Landsteiner Facts: |
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| Karl Landsteiner was born in Vienna and his father, Leopold Landsteiner was a prominent journalist and publisher. |
| Leopold died when Karl was six years old and he was raised by his mother, Fanny Hess. |
| In 1891 he graduated from the University of Vienna with a medical degree and published a paper on the influence of diet on blood composition. |
| Between 1891 and 1896 he studied biochemistry in Zurich, Wurzburg and Munich. |
| In 1896 he became an assistant at the Hygiene Institute of Vienna and from 1898 to 1908 he was assistant in the Department of Pathological Anatomy at the University of Vienna. |
| He discovered new facts about the immunology of syphilis and worked on the Wasserman reaction. |
| His research showed that polio could be transmitted to monkeys by injecting them with nerve tissue from infected cadavers and he added to our knowledge of the cause and immunology of polio. |
| In 1911 he isolated the polio virus which was critical to the future development of a vaccine. |
| Human to human blood transfusions had been tried but often led to shock, jaundice and hemoglobinuria and in 1901 his research into the cause of this reaction led him to discover the blood groups he labeled A, B, AB and O. |
| Based on his work, the first successful blood transfusion was performed at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York in 1907. |
| In 1923 he accepted a post at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York. |
| In 1937 He and his colleague, Alexander Wiener, were studying the causes of bleeding in the newborn when they discovered the Rh-factor, another blood antigen that can be present in all of the blood groups. |
| His ground-breaking work made blood transfusions possible and received the 1930 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his work. |
| He is credited with introducing chemistry into the study of serology and is recognized as the father of transfusion medicine. |
| From 1930 to 1932 Landsteiner worked with Clara Nigg and they succeeded in growing Rickettsia prowazekii, the causative agent for typhus, in the laboratory. |
| in 1946 he was posthumously awarded the Lasker Award. |
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