Story Highlights
- Historical event
- 26 June 1943
- Landsteiner discovered the existence of blood groups and the Rhesus factor (Rh-factor). He is also important for being the first to isolate the polio virus with his colleagues.
On this day in 1943 Karl Landsteiner, the famous scientist responsible for the classification of blood groups, died.
In 1930 Landsteiner was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his achievements. He is considered to be “the father of transfusion medicine”.
Besides for classification of blood groups, he is also known for being the first to isolate the polio virus together with his colleagues.
Karl Landsteiner was born in the spa town of Baden bei Wien, about twenty kilometers south of Vienna.
Being born in 1868, Landsteiner was almost the same age as Gandhi, Marie Curie, St. Leopold Mandić, Lenin and Slavoljub Penkala. Landsteiner worked as a scientist and a lecturer in Vienna in the period before World War I.
It was a golden age of Vienna when Gustav Klimt, Sigmund Freud, Leon Trotsky, Alma Mahler, Adolf Hitler, Oskar Kokoschka, Erwin Schrödinger, Ernst Mach, Otto Wagner, Josef Stalin , Egon Schiele, Adolf Loos, Tomáš Masaryk and Ferdinand Porscheamong, among others, stayed in the city and its surroundings.
Landsteiner discovered the existence of blood groups and the Rhesus factor (Rh-factor). Rhesus factor was named after the rhesus macaque monkeys whose blood was used in research.
After World War I, Landsteiner moved from Austria to Holland and then to the U.S., where he spent the rest of his life.
He died on this day in 1943 in New York at the age of 75. It is interesting that Karl Landsteiner was Catholic by religion.
