Karl Landsteiner

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Karl Landsteiner

Karl Landsteiner (born June 14, 1868 in Baden near Vienna , † June 26, 1943 in New York ) was an Austrian - American pathologist , hematologist and serologist who discovered the AB0 system of blood groups in 1900 , for which he won the Nobel Prize in 1930 received for physiology or medicine . Together with Erwin Popper , he was able to prove that poliomyelitis (polio) is an infectious disease. In 1921 further work led him to coining the term hapten . Landsteiner and Clara Nigg succeeded in growing Rickettsia prowazekii , the spotted fever pathogen , in living tissue cultures between 1930 and 1932. In 1940 he described the rhesus factor with Alexander Solomon Wiener and Philip Levine . He is considered the "father of immunohematology ". "Millions of people owe their lives or their healing to him," is how the pathological institute of the University of Vienna describes his achievements on its honorary board.

Life

Landsteiner's father Leopold (* 1817 in Vienna; † February 22, 1875 there), a well-known journalist and first editor-in-chief of the newspaper Die Presse , died at the age of 58 when Karl was six years old. As a result, he had a very close relationship with his mother Fanny, geb. Hess. His mother came from a Moravian Jewish merchant family and was 20 years younger than her husband, whom she left after only seven years of marriage. Her death mask hung in Karl's bedroom until his death. The Landsteiners were of Jewish faith. Because of an entry about his circumcision in Vienna, the capital was considered the birthplace of Karl Landsteiner for a long time. The more recent research found that he saw the light of day in Baden, where Leopold Landsteiner and his wife spent the summers for years. Landsteiner studied - after his today Gymnasium Wasagasse in Vienna (then KK Staatsgymnasium in XI districts. ) With preferential passed Matura (Abitur) - from 1885 at the Vienna University of Medicine and received his doctorate there in 1891. During his studies he published a paper on the Influence of diets on the composition of the blood.

When the stock market crash of 1873 with the economic stagnation turned into the "founder crisis", Jews were also blamed for it. Since the beginning of the 1890s, the anti-Semites emphasized the “racial idea” more and more. Shortly before finishing his studies, Landsteiner converted from Judaism to Roman Catholicism in 1890 - as part of a large wave of withdrawals from the Jewish faith in Vienna . In 1916, after years of engagement - Landsteiner could not decide to marry due to his voluntary workload - he married Leopoldine Helene Wlasto, a Greek Orthodox woman who converted to her husband's Roman Catholic faith. In 1937, Landsteiner unsuccessfully took legal action against an American publisher who had included him in the book Who's Who in American Jewry , stating that “it will be harmful to me, the religion of my ancestors to emphasize publicly ”. It was therefore not about changing religious convictions, but about avoiding any discrimination.

In 1917 his son Ernst Karl was born. Landsteiner was a good and extremely concerned father, who managed to raise a goat in the last year of the war, so that despite all the shortages at least fresh milk was available in the house. He personally collected herbs so that they could be used to make substitute spinach. He had bought a house in the Purkersdorf community so that his offspring would not have to grow up in the city, in Vienna's 9th district . Landsteiner was an excellent pianist. He had a large Bechstein grand piano in his drawing room. In his private life he liked to read, secretly also detective novels - secretly because he actually felt this reading was beneath his dignity. He was of sturdy build and had a drooping mustache.

Although he, like his wife, had been an American citizen since 1929, he felt himself to be a European all his life, but only spoke German when he was angry, as his students at the university found out.

Karl Landsteiner was a person full of energy and a thirst for research. His end is also typical of this: at the age of 75, on June 24, 1943, he suffered a heart attack while working in his laboratory at the Rockefeller Institute, which he succumbed two days later. In the last years of his life he also turned his attention to oncology , for a sad, human reason: his wife suffered from a malignant tumor on the thyroid gland, and in order to be able to help her, he studied malignant tumors, unfortunately without the desired success. His wife, who died the same year as him and on Christmas Day, and he were buried side by side at Prospect Hill Cemetery in Nantucket , Massachusetts , an island off the northeast coast of the United States. They had lived in a small house near the Sankaty Head Lighthouse on Nantucket, where he could get on with his work.

In Austria he is only remembered 18 years later, or 31 years after receiving the Nobel Prize: a plaque was dedicated to him in 1961 in the arcade courtyard of the University of Vienna , and his colleague Paul Speiser (1920–2009) wrote the overdue Landsteiner biography. Speiser finds it difficult to suppress his anger at the sins of omission, of which Austria's university medicine is guilty of one of its great minds: “One of many shameful evidence: Landsteiner has received a large number of awards in the course of his life, including honorary doctorates from many universities. Only one thing is missing: that of Vienna. Instead of proudly celebrating a Nobel Prize winner from within your own ranks, you punish him with envy. Only with Karl Landsteiner's portrait on the blue thousand of the last schilling banknote series did Austria take an important step further in the reorganization of its pantheon in 1997. ”(Landsteinergasse in Vienna's 16th district, Ottakring, originally Landsteinerstrasse, did not follow suit on November 4th, 1909 Karl Landsteiner, but named after the priest and writer Karl Borromäus Landsteiner ).

Scientific career

Karl Landsteiner (4th from left) in the Polio Hall of Fame

After completing his studies, Landsteiner spent five years abroad in laboratories in Zurich with Arthur Hantzsch , in Würzburg with the famous German chemist Emil Fischer and in Munich with Eugen Bamberger . In 1896 he returned to Vienna and was initially a surgeon at the 1st surgical clinic under Theodor Billroth . After completing this practical training, he devoted himself again to theory and became an assistant at the Hygiene Institute headed by Max von Gruber . There he conducted studies on the mechanism of immunity and the nature of antibodies . Between 1898 and 1908 Landsteiner was an assistant at the pathological anatomy department of the University of Vienna, then until 1919 a prosector at the Wilhelminenspital in Vienna, where he carried out 3,639 sections. In 1903 he completed his habilitation with Anton Weichselbaum in pathology and in 1911 Landsteiner was appointed associate professor of pathology.

poliomyelitis

During this time he published a lot of medical papers, including the transmission of polio . Landsteiner's achievement - together with Erwin Popper - was the discovery of the poliovirus , which finally proved that polio is an infectious disease. This was proven by injecting spinal fluid from a child who died of the disease into monkeys and then transferring it from one animal to the next. He laid the foundations for the later (1984/85) development of the vaccine against polio by the MS researcher Jonas Edward Salk (1914–1995).

Discovery of blood groups

Karl Landsteiner on the 1000 Schilling banknote (1997)
Karl Landsteiner on the reverse of the 1000 Schilling banknote (1997)
Blood transfusion in a military hospital during World War II

Landsteiner noticed in 1900 that the blood of two people often clumped together when mixed. The scope of the observation was not yet apparent to him when he was writing the manuscript, because he only describes the process of hemagglutination in a footnote:

“The serum of healthy people has an agglutinating effect not only on animal blood cells, but often also on human blood cells derived from other individuals. It remains to be decided whether this phenomenon is caused by original individual differences or by the effects of damage, for example of a bacterial nature. In fact, I found the aforementioned behavior to be particularly pronounced with blood from seriously ill patients. "

- Karl Landsteiner

And he reported that this effect also occurred through contact of blood with blood serum .

In his work “About agglutination phenomena of normal human blood”, he demanded for the first time, again in a footnote, that there must be three blood groups. He succeeded in identifying the blood group characteristics A, B and 0 (the latter then referred to as C). Landsteiner received the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1930 for his discovery of blood groups .

The AB blood group feature (first named in 1910 by Emil von Dungern and Ludwik Hirszfeld ) was discovered in 1902 by two of Landsteiner's colleagues, the Viennese internist Alfred von Decastello-Rechtwehr (1872–1960) and his colleague Adriano Sturli (1873–1964). The AB0 nomenclature proposed by Dungern and Hirszfeld in 1910 was not adopted internationally until 1928.

It was also Landsteiner who recognized that blood transfusion between people of the same group did not lead to the destruction of blood cells, but between people of different blood groups, so that in 1907 the first successful blood transfusion based on his work at the Mount Sinai Hospital in New York was carried out by Reuben Ottenberg . Landsteiner's discovery also led to the first parentage examinations in the sense of a paternity test . As early as 1924, Felix Bernstein recognized that blood groups are inherited according to Mendel's laws '', so that in some cases biological paternity could be excluded through blood group reports. In the same year, the first parentage reports were presented to the German Society for Forensic and Social Medicine. However, it took a few years for these tests to be recognized by the courts.

Today we know that people with blood group AB accept erythrocytes of all other blood groups (universal recipients), erythrocytes of blood group 0 can be received by all groups (universal donors). This is because people with blood group AB do not make antibodies against blood group A or B. Blood group 0, on the other hand, has neither characteristic A nor characteristic B, so that no antibodies can be formed against it in the recipient after the transfer.

Nowadays, only red blood cell concentrates without blood serum with antibodies are transferred in blood transfusions. This knowledge is very important, especially with blood transfusions and operations.

Further research

After the end of the First World War , the economic hardship in Austria was great and the prospects for an orderly academic career in Vienna seemed extremely uncertain. Landsteiner therefore accepted job offers from abroad. In 1919 he went to The Hague , where he led the prosecution of a small Catholic hospital. He remained scientifically active and treated various serological problems in a total of twelve publications. In 1921, for example, he reported on low molecular weight “specific substances” that require binding to a protein in order to become a so-called complete antigen, and for which he suggested the name haptens.

syphilis

The presentation of Spirochaeta pallida , the causative agent of syphilis, by means of dark field microscopy and the introduction of the beef heart extract as a reagent for the Wassermann reaction were essential contributions to the diagnosis of syphilis.

Rhesus factor

In 1922 Landsteiner accepted a position at the Rockefeller Institute in New York, where he and his students Philip Levine and Alexander Solomon Wiener described the rhesus factor that he had discovered in the blood of rhesus monkeys in 1940 . This made IgG anti-D prophylaxis of haemolyticus neonatorum disease , a serious and complex health disorder of the fetus and the newborn, possible.

In addition to working on blood groups, he dealt with questions about the development of paroxysmal cold hemoglobinuria , as a result of which the Donath-Landsteiner reaction could be developed as a test to confirm the diagnosis. In 1927/1928 he served as President of the American Association of Immunologists . In 1935 he was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society .

Typhus pathogen

In the field of bacteriology , Landsteiner and Clara Nigg succeeded in growing Rickettsia prowazekii , the spotted fever pathogen , in living tissue cultures between 1930 and 1932. In his last years he worked on oncological issues because his wife was suffering from a malignant thyroid tumor .

Honors

Memorial plaque in the arcade courtyard of the University of Vienna, artist: Arnold Hartig (1878–1972), unveiled in 1961
Honor plaque of the Dutch Red Cross
Memorial plaque at the pathological institute in Vienna, 1990
Memorial plaque for the namesake of Karl Landsteiner Private University Krems, 2013

Works (selection)

  • About agglutination of normal human blood. In: Wiener Klinische Wochenschrift. Volume 14, 1901, pp. 1132-1134.
  • About the usability of individual blood differences for forensic practice . In: Zeitschrift für Medizinalbeamte, 1903
  • On the dependence of the serological specificity on the chemical structure , 1918
  • Specific serum reactions with simple compounds of known constitution , 1920
  • Serological studies of the blood of great apes , 1925
  • On Individual Differences in Human Blood , 1928
  • Blood groups and their practical importance, especially for blood transfusion , 1930
  • The specificity of serological reactions (Berlin 1933, new edition 1962)
  • with Alexander Solomon Wiener: An agglutinable factor in human blood recognized by immune sera for Rhesus blood . In: Proceedings of the Society of Experimental Biology and Medicine, 43 (1940), 223

literature

  • Paul Speiser. Karl Landsteiner, discoverer of blood groups and pioneer of immunology. Biography of a Nobel Prize winner from the Vienna Medical School . 3. unchang. Edition. Blackwell Ueberreuter-Wiss., Berlin 1990 ISBN 3-89412-084-3 .
  • Landsteiner, Karl. In: Austrian Biographical Lexicon 1815–1950 (ÖBL). Volume 4, Publishing House of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna 1969, p. 433 f. (Direct links on p. 433 , p. 434 ).
  • Ralf-Dieter Hofheinz: From Viennese pathology to the research laboratory in New York: Karl Landsteiner and the discovery of blood groups in 1900. In: Doctors newspaper, the current newspaper from Springer Medicine , Berlin and Neu-Isenburg No. 176, 4. October 2000, p. 32.
  • Susanne Blumesberger, Michael Doppelhofer, Gabriele Mauthe: Handbook of Austrian authors of Jewish origin from the 18th to the 20th century. Volume 2: J-R. Edited by the Austrian National Library. Saur, Munich 2002, ISBN 3-598-11545-8 , p. 781.
  • Hans Schadewaldt:  Landsteiner, Karl. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 13, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1982, ISBN 3-428-00194-X , pp. 521-523 ( digitized version ).
  • Karl Holubar : Landsteiner, Karl. In: Werner E. Gerabek , Bernhard D. Haage, Gundolf Keil , Wolfgang Wegner (eds.): Enzyklopädie Medizingeschichte. De Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2005, ISBN 3-11-015714-4 , p. 822.
  • Axel W. Bauer : Karl Landsteiner: Discoverer of the blood groups in Vienna - Nobel laureate in New York. In: Transfusionsmedizin 8 (2018), pp. 164–169.
  • Masaya Itou, Mitsuharu Sato, Takashi Kitano: Analysis of a larger SNP dataset from the HapMap project confirmed that the modern human A allele of the AB0 blood group genes is a descendant of a recombinant between B and 0 alleles. In: Internat J Evol Biol 2013. Free article.
  • Paul Speiser: Landsteiner, Karl . In: Charles Coulston Gillispie (Ed.): Dictionary of Scientific Biography . tape 7 : Iamblichus - Karl Landsteiner . Charles Scribner's Sons, New York 1973, p. 622-625 .
  • Michael Heidelberger, Karl Landsteiner, A Biographical Memoir , National Academy of Sciences (English), 1969, with an extensive list of his publications. Retrieved July 12, 2020.

Web links

Commons : Karl Landsteiner  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Pia Maria Plechl : Karl Landsteiner . In: Thomas Chorherr (Ed.): Great Austrians . Ueberreuter , Vienna, Heidelberg 1985, ISBN 3-8000-3212-0 .
  2. ↑ Staudacher, Anna L. (2009) "... reports the exit from the Mosaic faith". 18,000 withdrawals from Judaism in Vienna, 1868–1914: names - sources - dates . Peter Lang, Frankfurt, ISBN 978-3-631-55832-4 , p. 349.
  3. ^ Concise Dictionary of American Jewish Biography . The Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives.
  4. ^ Austrian National Library, Vienna, Susanne Blumesberger, Michael Doppelhofer: Handbook of Austrian Authors of Jewish Origin: 18th to 20th Century . Walter de Gruyter, 22 December 2011, ISBN 978-3-11-094900-1 , p. 781.
  5. ↑ Dr. Landsteiner Sues to Escape Being Labeled Jew . April 6, 1937.
  6. ^ Eleonore Kemetmüller, At the grave of Karl Landsteiner , Karl Landsteiner University. Retrieved July 11, 2020.
  7. ↑ Dietmar Grieser: You are home to big names: Austrians all over the world . Amalthea Signum Verlag, July 4, 2017, ISBN 978-3-903083-86-8 , pp. 208–.
  8. ^ Achim Thom : Karl Landsteiner , In: Wolfgang U. Eckart , Christoph Gradmann (Ed.): Ärztelexikon. From antiquity to the 20th century. C. H. Beck, Munich 1995, pp. 226 f., ISBN 3-406-37485-9 , 3rd edition, Springer / Heidelberg / Berlin et al. 2006, p. 203, print and online version ( ISBN 978-3-540-29584-6 or ISBN 978-3-540-29585-3 ).
  9. ↑ Title of the publication: K. Landsteiner, E. Popper: Transmission of poliomyelitis acuta to monkeys. In: Journal for Immunity Research and Experimental Therapy , Volume 2 (1909), pp. 377-390
  10. ↑ Karl Landsteiner: To the knowledge of the antifermentative, lytic and agglutinating effects of the blood serum and the lymph. Section IV of it. For knowledge of the chemical behavior of lysines, agglutinins (1), antiferments. Page 361 in: Centralblatt für Bakteriologie, Parasitenkunde and Infectious Diseases 27/10 + 11/1900: 357–362. Digitized
  11. ↑ Karl Landsteiner: About agglutination phenomena of normal human blood. In: Wiener Klinische Wochenschrift 14/46/1901: 1132–1134. doi: 10.1016 / B978-012448510-5.50165-5 .
  12. ↑ Bernd Suess: The determination of paternity independent of contestation proceedings: the new right of parentage with special consideration of the perspective of the father . Peter Lang, 2010, ISBN 978-3-631-60264-5 , p. 7.
  13. ↑ Member History: Karl Landsteiner. American Philosophical Society, accessed November 20, 2018 .
  14. ^ The first award winners of the Paul Ehrlich Foundation , journal for applied chemistry. 43. J., 1930, pp. 335-336.
  15. ↑ Council meeting of May 18, 2011 (resolution no. RBV-822/11), official announcement: Leipzig Official Gazette no. 11 of June 4, 2011, valid since July 5, 2011 and August 5, 2011. See Leipziger Official Journal No. 16 of September 10, 2011
  16. ^ Doodle for Karl Landsteiner's 148th birthday , Google.
personal data
SURNAME Landsteiner, Karl
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian pathologist, serologist and Nobel Prize winner
DATE OF BIRTH June 14, 1868
PLACE OF BIRTH to bathe
DATE OF DEATH June 26, 1943
Place of death New York City