19 Facts About Rudolf Weigl

Rudolf Weigl was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Medicine each year between 1930 and 1934, and from 1936 to 1939.

Rudolf Weigl was born in Prerau, which at the time was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, to Austrian parents, of Austro-Moravian descent.

Rudolf Weigl then received his doctorate degrees in zoology, comparative anatomy, and histology.

Rudolf Weigl worked at a military hospital in Przemysl, where he supervised the Laboratory for the Study of Spotted Typhus from 1918 to 1920.

Rudolf Weigl spent the next four years in Lwow focusing his research on developing a vaccine for spotted fever.

Rudolf Weigl led and directed the Institute for Typhus and Virus Research based in Lwow.

Rudolf Weigl created a vaccine for spotted fever; the vaccine did not provide full immunity against the disease, but it substantially reduced the symptoms.

Rudolf Weigl hired several Jewish friends and colleagues for the plant.

Rudolf Weigl employed and protected approximately 2,000 Polish intellectuals, Jews and members of the Polish underground.

Rudolf Weigl's vaccines were smuggled into ghettos in Lwow and Warsaw, various concentration camps, and even certain Gestapo prisons.

In 1930, following Charles Nicolle's 1909 discovery that lice were the vector of epidemic typhus, and following the work done on a vaccine for the closely related Rocky Mountain spotted fever, Rudolf Weigl took the next step and developed a technique to produce a typhus vaccine by growing infected lice and crushing them into a vaccine paste.

Rudolf Weigl discovered that a vaccine could be developed from lice stomachs infected with Rickettsia prowazeki, the causative agent of typhus in humans.

Rudolf Weigl developed this first version of the vaccine in 1918 and began experimenting on guinea pigs and even human volunteers.

Rudolf Weigl refined this technique over the years until 1933 when he performed large-scale testing to cultivate bacteria and experiment with the lice using a micro-infection strategy.

Rudolf Weigl alleviated this problem by vaccinating the human "injectees", which successfully protected them from death.

Rudolf Weigl was appointed chair of the General Microbiology Institute at the Jagiellonian University, and later chair of biology in the medical faculty at the University of Poznan.

Rudolf Weigl retired in 1951, but production of his vaccine continued for several years.

Rudolf Weigl died on 11 August 1957 in the Polish mountain resort of Zakopane at age 73.

Rudolf Weigl was buried at the historic Rakowicki Cemetery in Krakow.