Karl Landsteiner

Origins and early life

Karl Landsteiner was born at Baden bei Wien on 14 June 1868 into a Jewish family.

Work and career

His father Leopold, a well-known Viennese journalist and editor-in-chief of Die Presse, died when Karl was six, and the boy grew very close to his mother Fanny Hess. He converted from Judaism and was baptised into the Catholic Church in 1890. He read medicine at the University of Vienna and took his doctorate in 1891, then studied chemistry at Würzburg under Emil Fischer, in Munich and in Zürich, before returning to Vienna, where over ten years at the pathological-anatomical institute he published seventy-five papers and performed some 3,600 autopsies.

Transfusion in the nineteenth century was a lottery: a patient recovered or died and nobody could say why. In 1900 Landsteiner noticed that blood from two people can clump when brought into contact, and in 1901 he traced the clumping to the serum and sorted human blood into the groups now called A, B and O. Matching donor to recipient made transfusion safe, and the first such transfusion was performed at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York in 1907.

He isolated the polio virus with Erwin Popper in 1909, moved to the Rockefeller Institute in New York in 1923, and in 1937, with Alexander Wiener, identified the Rhesus factor. He received the 1930 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, and is remembered as the father of transfusion medicine. He died in New York on 26 June 1943.