Karl Landsteiner

Austrian–American pathologist (1868–1943)

Landsteiner, the son of a prominent Viennese journalist, was educated at the University of Vienna, where he obtained his MD in 1891. After studying chemistry in Germany under Emil Fischer and in Switzerland under the German chemist Arthur Hantzsch, Landsteiner returned to the University of Vienna to work as a pathologist, serving as professor of pathology from 1911 to 1919. He then spent a couple of years in Holland before moving to America, where he took up an appointment with the Rockefeller Institute, New York, in 1922, remaining there until his death.

In 1902 Landsteiner announced one of the major medical discoveries of the century, that of the ABO blood group system. It was already known that the proteins in any animal or plant species were specific to that species and differed from those of other species, but Landsteiner went on to suggest that individuals within a species showed similar though small differences in their proteins. He knew that if serum (blood from which the cells and clotting factors have been removed) of one species is mixed with the erythrocytes (red cells) of another species the resulting mixture will agglutinate (clump together); he therefore decided to see what would happen when serum and erythrocytes from different humans were combined. In many cases there was no agglutination – it was as if the blood cells were mixed with their own serum – but in others he noted that agglutination occurred with just as strong an interaction as that between serum and cells of different species. The pattern of agglutination was such that Landsteiner proposed the existence of four distinct human blood groups, which he named A, B, AB, and O, based on the presence or absence in the blood of one or both of two antigens (substances against which antibodies react), which he named A and B. On this supposition individuals of blood group A (i.e., with antigen A) possess in their serum an antibody to antigen B, while group B individuals possess an antibody against antigen A; type AB individuals possess both antigens A and B (and therefore neither anti-A nor anti-B antibody), while type O individuals possess neither antigen and both antibodies.

Not only did Landsteiner's work at last permit successful blood transfusions and save many thousands of lives, it also raised profound questions about the nature of the immunological system – questions still being vigorously pursued. The ABO grouping was the first of many different groups to be discovered; Landsteiner himself, in 1927, discovered the second and third systems, the MN and the P. For his work on blood groups Landsteiner was awarded the 1930 Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine.

He also produced major results outside the field of serology, making (in 1908) one of the earliest breakthroughs in the conquest of polio. By taking pieces of the spinal cord of a polio victim and soaking them in liquid, he produced a mixture capable of infecting monkeys. Further work led him to conclude that a virus caused the disease. Landsteiner's approach permitted laboratory investigation and experimentation, which is the initial step in gaining understanding and control of any infective organism.

In the field of immunology Landsteiner demonstrated the specificity of antibodies by introducing the concept of the hapten. Haptens are small organic molecules that can stimulate antibody production only when combined with a protein molecule. Landsteiner combined haptens of known structures with such proteins as albumin and showed that small changes in the hapten would radically affect the production of antibodies.

Landsteiner was fortunate to be able to continue with creative scientific work virtually to the end of his life: he in fact suffered his fatal heart attack while working at his laboratory bench with a pipette in his hand. He was over 70 when, in 1940, he announced the discovery of the rhesus (Rh) factor, then responsible for the consequent serious illness or death of 1 in 200 white babies. The factor was so named as it was first detected in the blood of rhesus monkeys.

Landsteiner's work has continued to be the foundation for studies in many other related fields including that, for example, of the American biochemist William Boyd (1903––sp;–sp;). In his Genetics and the Races of Man (1950) Boyd demonstrated that analysis of blood samples allowed us to distinguish 13 races, namely, early European, northern and eastern European, Lapp, Mediterranean, African, Asian, Deavidian, Amerind, Indonesian, Melanesian, Polynesian and Australian aborigine.

Karl Landsteiner (1868-1943), the Austrian-born American immunologist and Nobel Prize winner, discovered blood groups and helped establish the science of immunochemistry.

Karl Landsteiner was born in Vienna on June 14, 1868. In 1891 he was awarded a medical degree by the University of Vienna. For the following 5 years he studied physiological chemistry in laboratories in Germany and Switzerland. In 1898 he moved to the Pathological Anatomical Institute in Vienna, where he carried on work that led to the discovery of blood groups.

It was known that blood transfusion often resulted in dangerous or fatal clumping of the red blood corpuscles. After a series of tests performed in his laboratory, Landsteiner postulated the existence in the corpuscles of agglutinogens (antigens) called A and B and in blood serum of agglutinins (antibodies) called anti-a and anti-b. Reaction to transfused blood (clumping) depended on whether the agglutinogens A, or B, or A and B, or neither were present in the red blood corpuscles. Where the agglutinogen A was present, serum containing the agglutinin anti-a could not be used, and so forth. Landsteiner's discovery was first announced in a footnote to a paper appearing in 1900. In 1909 he devised the familiar classification scheme for blood groups: A, B, AB, O. In 1930 he received the Nobel Prize for his discovery.

In 1906 Landsteiner and Victor Mucha introduced the use of the dark-field method of diagnosis for the presence of the spirochete of syphilis. In 1908 Landsteiner reported the transmittal of poliomyelitis to monkeys from human material, thus substantiating the theory that the cause of the disease was a virus. In 1919 he went from his work as professor of pathologic anatomy at the University of Vienna to The Hague in the Netherlands as pathologist at the R. K. Ziekenhuis. In 1922 he went to New York City's Rockefeller Institute. He became a citizen of the United States and continued at the institute until his death.

In 1927 Landsteiner and Philip Levine announced the discovery of the M and N agglutinogens, and in 1940 Landsteiner and a colleague discovered still another group of agglutinogens called the Rh factors. Both discoveries were announced in the Proceedings of the Society for Experimental Biology. Of fundamental importance to the rise of immunochemistry was Landsteiner's demonstration that serological specificity is based on the chemical structure of antigens. His findings were summarized in Specificity of Serological Reactions (1936). Landsteiner continued to work until 2 days before his death on June 26, 1943.

Further Reading

A sketch and a list of Landsteiner's more than 350 publications is in Obituary Notices of the Fellows of the Royal Society, vol. 5 (1945). Another short sketch is in Theodore L. Sourkes, Nobel Prize Winners in Medicine and Physiology (1953; rev. ed. 1966). Nobel Foundation, Nobel Lectures in Physiology or Medicine, 1922-1941, vol. 2 (1965), provides biographical data and information on the events leading to Landsteiner's discovery and its significance.

Landsteiner, Karl (kärl länt'shtīnər) , 1868–1943, American medical research worker, b. Vienna, M.D. Univ. of Vienna, 1891. In 1922 he came to the United States to join the staff of the Rockefeller Institute (now Rockefeller Univ.). He later became a U.S. citizen. For his discovery of human blood groups he won the 1930 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. As a result of his research in immunology and the chemistry of antigens and serological reactions, he made valuable contributions in hemolysis and in methods of studying poliomyelitis. In 1940 he identified, in collaboration with A. S. Wiener, the Rh factor.

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