Karl Landsteiner

Biologist

• Born: June 14, 1868
• Birthplace: Vienna, Austria
• Died: June 26, 1943
• Place of death: New York, New York

Austrian American immunologist

Remembered for his discovery of blood groups, Landsteiner also worked in immunology and immunochemistry and helped found the science of serology, the study of blood serum. A significant result of his discovery of blood groups was an increase in the safety of blood transfusions. His discoveries relating to syphilis, poliomyelitis, and various blood diseases eventually led to their control or cure.

Born: June 14, 1868; Vienna, Austria

Died: June 26, 1943; New York, New York

Primary field: Medicine

Specialties: Biochemistry; physiology; virology

Early Life

Karl Landsteiner was born shortly after the formation of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Landsteiner’s Jewish family lived in Baden bei Wien, a wealthy suburb of Vienna. The young Landsteiner developed intellectually through his wide reading and his education in a local elementary school and gymnasium. He was also an accomplished pianist.

By 1885, when Landsteiner passed the entrance examination for the University of Vienna, he had decided on a medical career. This goal was modified by his enthusiasm for his chemistry courses, and he became deeply interested in scientific research. After his year of obligatory military service, he and his mother converted from Judaism to Roman Catholicism. Landsteiner’s new life as a scientist began after his graduation from medical school in 1891, when instead of using his medical degree to become a practicing physician, he began postgraduate research with a series of distinguished chemists, including Ernst Ludwig, Emil Fischer, Eugen von Bamberger, and Arthur Hantzsch.

Landsteiner’s fascination with chemistry blossomed into a passion for using chemistry to solve medical problems. He returned to Vienna to work in a clinic and then in the Department of Hygiene at the University of Vienna, where he became interested in antibodies and published his first articles on blood.

Life’s Work

From the end of the nineteenth century until 1908, Landsteiner was an assistant to Anton Weichselbaum, the director of the Institute of Pathological Anatomy at the University of Vienna. Under Weichselbaum’s tutelage, Landsteiner performed thousands of postmortem examinations, deepening his knowledge of human pathology. In particular, he became engrossed with the problem of why blood transfusions were sometimes successful and sometimes lethal.

He used his own blood and the blood of his assistants to show that blood incompatibilities had a simple explanation. By separating his samples into plasma and red-blood-cell components, he discovered that blood serum (the part that is not red or white blood cells) differed in its ability to clump (or agglutinate) red cells. Through agglutination experiments he found that human blood could be divided into three groups, initially called A, B, and C. Landsteiner concluded that A serum agglutinated B red cells, B serum agglutinated A red cells, C serum agglutinated red cells of both A and B, and that C’s red cells were not agglutinated by A or B serum.

In 1901, Landsteiner published this critical discovery, and a year later, two of his pupils, using a large group of volunteers, found the rare blood group now known as AB (Landsteiner’s C group later became known as O). He quickly recognized the importance of this discovery for human blood transfusion therapy, but it did not come into practical use for several years. However, in 1902, he became a full member of the Austrian Imperial Society of Physicians and presented a paper to the Institute of Forensic Medicine describing a new method of classifying blood stains to facilitate solving violent crimes. This method gained rapid acceptance.

Landsteiner used his chemical vision to deepen scientists’ understanding of antibodies. By causing chemical reactions between well-known organic and protein molecules, he created artificial antigens that would react with antibodies, thus demonstrating that their specificity was rooted in chemical structure. In 1905, he successfully infected monkeys with syphilis, which allowed researchers to investigate the causal agent of this sexually transmitted disease.

Landsteiner became the chief pathologist at Wilhelmina Hospital in Vienna in 1908. He published many papers on serology, bacteriology, and pathology. During this time he developed a purification technique for antibodies that influenced immunologists throughout the world. He was the first scientist to isolate the poliomyelitis virus, and he also managed to transfer this disease in the lab from humans to monkeys. He studied how the polio virus proliferated and how it could be neutralized.

When he was forty-eight years old, Landsteiner married Leopoldine Helene Wlasto. They had a son who was christened Ernst Karl on April 8, 1917. Austria’s defeat in World War I led to a rapid deterioration in financial support for medical research, so Landsteiner left Vienna for the Netherlands to become chief pathologist at a Roman Catholic hospital in The Hague. One of his first projects was a comparative study of the blood of humans and other primates. His results proved useful to anthropologists studying the common ancestry of humans and certain primates. He also returned to his studies on the specificity of antigen-antibody reactions.

In 1922, Landsteiner accepted an invitation to join the staff of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York City, where he remained for the rest of his life. He continued his work on blood, and in 1927 he and his chief collaborator, Philip Levine, published their discovery of the additional blood groups M, N, and MN. While this discovery was not critical to performing blood transfusions, it did prove useful to anthropologists and forensic scientists. For example, these blood groups were widely used in paternity lawsuits. Landsteiner became a US citizen in 1929. In 1930, he won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discovery of human blood groups.

During the 1930s, Landsteiner continued to develop his ideas on immunogenicity, the ability of living things to generate an immune response. He recapitulated much of what he had learned to that point in his classic book Die Spezifizität der serologischen Reaktionen (1933; The Specificity of Serological Reactions, 1936), which became for many years the most important text for immunochemists. Although Landsteiner formally retired in 1939, he continued working and discovered a new factor in human blood, the Rh factor, named after the rhesus monkey in which it was first detected. This factor was important in understanding a disease in which a mother’s antibodies harm her fetus. The Rh factor was also responsible for adverse transfusion reactions.

Landsteiner lived to witness the growth of Nazism in Germany and his native Austria culminate in the early years of World War II. He found solace in his laboratory research, and, working with immunologist Merrill Chase, he made important discoveries in cellular immunity. For example, he found that leukocytes (white blood cells) play an important role in the immune response.

Despite a lifetime’s work in medical research, Landsteiner was unable to mitigate his wife’s malignant thyroid cancer. While working in his laboratory at the Rockefeller Institute, Landsteiner suffered a heart attack on June 24, 1943, and died two days later. His wife survived him for several months, dying herself on Christmas Day, 1943.

Impact

Landsteiner made fundamental discoveries in immunology, bacteriology, histology, virology, and pathology, and some scholars call him the founder of serology. He identified agents responsible for the immune response, examined antigen-antibody interactions, and studied allergic reactions. He was most famous for the blood groups that he discovered near the start of his career, and for the Rh factor that he discovered near its end. These discoveries made possible modern blood banks and transfusions, and his work on the uniqueness of every individual’s blood became the basis for how questions of paternity and criminal guilt were settled in certain cases. Landsteiner’s discovery of the viral cause of polio blazed the path to modern virology. He received many honors in his lifetime, but he did not live to see the rehabilitation of his reputation in Austria and Germany.

Bibliography

Diamond, Louis K. “The Story of Blood Groups.” Blood, Pure and Eloquent: A Story of Discovery, of People, and of Ideas. Ed. Maxwell M. Wintrobe. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1980. Print. Discusses Landsteiner’s accomplishments in the history of hematology, the study of blood. Includes glossary and name and subject indexes.

Eibl, Martha M., W. R. Mayr, and G. Jeanette Thorbecke, eds. Epitope Recognition Since Landsteiner’s Discovery: One Hundred Years Since the Discovery of Human Blood Groups. New York: Springer, 2002. Print. Opens with a discussion of Landsteiner’s life and career, featuring essays analyzing his achievements in various fields.

Mazumdar, Pauline. Species and Specificity: An Interpretation of the History of Immunology. New York: Cambridge UP, 2002. Print. Portrays Landsteiner as a pivotal participant in discussions about the role of biological specificity in immunology. Landsteiner’s work and contributions are a major part of chapters 11, 12, 13, and 15.