16 Facts About Karl Landsteiner

Karl Landsteiner emigrated with his family to New York in 1923 at the age of 55 for professional opportunities, working for the Rockefeller Institute.

Karl Landsteiner had distinguished the main blood groups in 1901, having developed the modern system of classification of blood groups from his identification of the presence of agglutinins in the blood.

Karl Landsteiner was posthumously awarded the Lasker Award in 1946, and has been described as the father of transfusion medicine.

From 1891 to 1893, Landsteiner studied chemistry in Wurzburg under Hermann Emil Fischer, in Munchen, Eugen Bamberger and in Zurich under Arthur Rudolf Hantzsch.

Karl Landsteiner had a number of publications from that period, some of them in co-operation with his professors.

From November 1897 to 1908 Karl Landsteiner was an assistant at the pathological-anatomical institute of the University of Vienna under Anton Weichselbaum, where he published 75 papers, dealing with issues in serology, bacteriology, virology and pathological anatomy.

From 1908 to 1920 Karl Landsteiner was prosector at the Wilhelminenspital in Vienna and in 1911 he was sworn in as an associate professor of pathological anatomy.

In 1900 Karl Landsteiner found out that the blood of two people under contact agglutinates, and in 1901 he found that this effect was due to contact of blood with blood serum.

Karl Landsteiner found out that blood transfusion between persons with the same blood group did not lead to the destruction of blood cells, whereas this occurred between persons of different blood groups.

In 1930 Karl Landsteiner was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in recognition of these achievements.

Karl Landsteiner decided to move to the Netherlands and accepted a post as prosector in the small Catholic St Joannes de Deo hospital in The Hague and, in order to improve his financial situation took a job in a small factory, producing old tuberculin.

Karl Landsteiner published a number of papers, five of them being published in Dutch by the Royal Academy of Sciences.

Karl Landsteiner arrived there with his family in the spring of 1923.

Karl Landsteiner was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society in 1941.

Karl Landsteiner converted from Judaism to Christianity in 1890, and was baptised into the Catholic Church.

In 1937, Karl Landsteiner unsuccessfully initiated legal action against an American publisher who had included him in the book Who's Who in American Jewry.