Karl Landsteiner

Defeater of polio

Vienna was a centre of groundbreaking medical developments which had a significant impact on people’s faith in progress from the mid-19th century on. Karl Landsteiner, who was born to a Jewish family not far from the capital and converted to Catholicism in 1890, was influenced by the famed Viennese Medical School.#

After his doctorate he was active in laboratories in Zürich, Würzburg and Munich but he returned to Vienna before the close of the century, where he gained his habilitation (qualification to teach at university level) in 1903 but was not awarded an associate professorship for another eight years. As an assistant at the Anatomic Pathology Institute he discovered the classic blood groups A, B and O and created the preconditions for blood transfusions.

He worked as a doctor at Wilhelminenspital until the end of the First World War, then changed to a small Catholic hospital in The Hague before emigrating to the US. There, from 1922 until his death, he taught at the Rockefeller Institute in New York, where, along with two American colleagues, he discovered the rhesus factor.

Extremely productive scientifically in his lifetime, Landsteiner not only founded modern immunohaematology but also published revolutionary research in the field of infectious diseases, such as the transmission and detection of syphilis. His publications on polio were fundamental to its prevention. The famous serologist and an honorary doctor of Harvard and Cambridge universities was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1930.