Karl Landsteiner
1868-1943
Austrian-American Immunologist and Pathologist
Karl Landsteiner is recognized for his pioneering research into the workings of the human immune system. He was awarded the 1930 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his discovery of human blood groups, which he classified in the ABO blood type system. He alsodiscovered the polio virus and developed a test for syphilis.
Born in Vienna on June 14, 1868, Landsteiner was the only child of Dr. Leopold Landsteiner, a noted journalist. His father was the Paris correspondent for several German newspapers and later founded his own newspaper, Presse. When Karl was six, his father died of a massive heart attack, and he was placed under the guardianship of a family friend.
At age 17, Landsteiner entered the medical school at the University of Vienna, where he developed an interest in organic chemistry. He remained close to his mother, and in 1889 they both converted from Judaism to Catholicism. He graduated from medical school at the age of 23 and immediately went into a research laboratory, where he applied his passion for organic chemistry to the field of medicine.
While at the Vienna Pathological Institute (1898-1908), he became interested in the problem of why some people could get blood from others but some died. While doing autopsies at the institute, he noted that some blood would clump or agglutinate when mixed with other blood. He proposed there were factors in the blood that were compatible and others that were not. He called these A, B, and C (C was later renamed O). Two other researchers added AB. He showed that a kind of sugar-containing substance, called an antigen, was attached to the plasma membrane of the red blood cells that determined these factors. Further investigation showed that A would always clump with type B. Type O was a universal donor and did not clump with either. The rare form AB was identified as the universal recipient.
Testing the research of Landsteiner in 1907, Dr. Reuben Ottenberg of Mt. Sinai Hospital, New York, performed the first successful blood transfusion. The discovery saved many lives during World War I, the first time that transfusions were performed on a large scale.
Using the information on blood types, Landsteiner and a colleague, Max Richter of the Institute of Forensic Medicine, also devised a plan to use dried blood left at crime scenes to help investigators solve the crime.
From 1908-1920 Landsteiner was head of the pathology department at the Vienna Wilhemina Hospital. There, he wrote numerous papers on bacteriology and immunology and made several important discoveries, including how antigens and antibodies are related. He also developedmethods for purifying antibodies and laboratory techniques related to immunology. Although refined, many of the techniques are still used today.
Karl Landsteiner. (Library of Congress. Reproduced with permission.)Landsteiner was one of the first to use animal models to study disease. He successfully transferred the sexually transmitted disease syphilis from humans to apes. Later, he worked to develop a technique called dark-field illumination to identify the bacteria that cause syphilis.
While at the institute, a young boy who had died of polio was brought in for autopsy. Using part of the spinal cord from the boy, Landsteiner injected it into rabbits, guinea pigs, mice, and monkeys. He was puzzled that only the monkeys developed the disease. It was thought that the condition was caused by a bacterium, and Landsteiner went to Paris to collaborate with Romanian scientist Constantin Lefaditis of the Pasteur Institute. The two realized that polio was not caused by a bacterium, but a virus. They traced how it was transmitted, how long the exposure must be, and how the serum of another patient could neutralize the virus in the laboratory. In 1912 they predicted that a vaccine against this virus could be developed, however, this did not occur until 1955, when Jonas Salk developed the first successful polio vaccine.
Dedicated completely to his work, Landsteiner did not marry until age 48, when he methis wife, Helene, at a war hospital. They married in 1916 and had one son, Ernst Karl, in 1917. Postwar Austria was very chaotic, with shortages of food and supplies. Fortunately, Landsteiner was able to get a job at a small Catholic hospital in the Netherlands. Although he was assigned to do routine blood and urine work, he made a major discovery with haptens, small organic molecules that determine antigen-antibody reactions in the presence of a protein. He showed that certain inflammations of the skin caused contact dermatitis and launched into the study of allergic reactions.
Landsteiner was fortunate to be offered a position at the Rockefeller Institute in New York. Refining his previous work, he found new blood groups M, N, and P. He and Philip Levine published a work in 1927 that described the use of blood groups in paternity suits.
In 1929 Landsteiner became a United States citizen, but did not like the crowds of New York and did not care to be a celebrity. When he won the Nobel Prize in 1930, he shunned publicity. His Nobel lecture, describing differences in blood between individuals, as well as species, was at odds with the medical community of the day, although it is well accepted now.
He officially retired in 1939, but continued to work on another blood factor called Rh, because it was first discovered in rhesus monkeys. The incompatible blood factor is responsible for a condition that occurs when a mother without the blood factor carries a fetus with the factor. The infant may have a deadly condition known as erythroblastosis fetalis.
Toward the end of his life, Landsteiner became increasingly worried that the Nazis would take over the world. He died in 1943, at age 75, of a massive heart attack just after completing the manuscript of a new book and seeing his son finish medical school. Tributes were paid to Landsteiner, but there was no mention of his death in Germany or Austria, his home, until 1947, after the Nazis had been defeated.
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