Rudolf Weigl

Rudolf Weigl

Monument to Rudolf Weigl in Breslau

Rudolf Stefan Jan Weigl (born September 2, 1883 in Přerov , Moravia , † August 11, 1957 in Zakopane , Poland ) was a Polish biologist who saved the lives of a large number of people during the Second World War . He also developed a vaccine against typhus .

Live and act

Rudolf Weigl, born in Přerov / Moravia in 1883, came from a German-Moravian family who, after the death of Weigl's father, turned to Polish Galician culture under the influence of his new stepfather, the high school teacher Józef Trojnar .

Weigl attended high schools in Jasło and Stryj in Galicia. He then studied natural sciences at the University of Lviv . After graduating in 1907, he received his doctorate and habilitated in zoology , comparative anatomy and histology in 1913 . As a private lecturer, he then carried out research on aspects of cells and transplantation.

During the First World War he was called up as a scientist in the medical services of the Austro-Hungarian army and began researching epidemic diseases. While researching typhus, he found a typhus vaccine .

From 1918 to 1920 Weigl worked in the new Polish state in a military laboratory in Przemyśl before he was appointed professor of biology at Lviv University. In the interwar period, his work achieved international recognition. He was four times (1932, 1936, 1942, 1946) a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Medicine , which he never received.

After the outbreak of war in 1939 , he returned to Poland from a research stay in Abyssinia . After the invasion of the Soviet troops in September 1939, he continued the work of the institute in the now Soviet-occupied Lemberg . The building of the neighboring girls' high school was connected to the institute. The production of typhus vaccines has increased massively. After the German invasion of the city on June 30, 1941, the new occupiers shot a total of 25 professors from the university , including the former Polish prime minister and mathematician Kazimierz Bartel . In view of the increasing danger to his own life, Weigl agreed to continue working among the Germans, but refused to sign the German People's List .

In the following four years he headed the Institute for Typhus and Virus Research in Lemberg, an offshoot of the Institute for Typhus and Virus Research of the Army High Command in Cracow under Hermann Eyer . His spotted fever vaccine, which did not induce immunity but led to a significantly milder course of infection, was given to around eight million Poles and Russians in the 1930s. Weigl discussed the dosage of the vaccine in a human experiment with Eyer in 1942. In this context, he saved the lives of numerous people (the number is estimated at several thousands) by describing their work as "vital to the war effort". Polish university professors such as Stefan Banach , Bronisław Knaster and Władysław Orlicz were among the employees . The employees fed infected lice with their blood, and the serum was obtained from the intestines of the insects. Among those rescued in this way were also Jews, such as his scientist colleague and sociologist Ludwik Fleck .

After the end of the war, Weigl continued his research at the universities of Krakow and Poznan and was retired in 1951. He died in Zakopane, Poland in 1957 .

Ignored by the communist rulers and even accused of collaboration with the Germans, his achievements were only officially recognized after 1989. In 2003 he was posthumously awarded the Righteous Among the Nations medal in Yad Vashem .

Web links

• Biography of Weigl (1967) by Stefan Kryński
• Page with many links and pictures about Weigl
• Rudolf Weigl and the etiological control of typhus by H. Eyer
• Bibliography of typhus and Weigl history articles from PubMed
• Nominations for the Nobel Prize between 1930 and 1939
• Materials by Halina Szymanska Ogrodzinska with reports on the underground activities of the Weigl Institute during World War II
• List of employees of the Institute for Spotted Fever and Virus Research Lemberg (1941–1944)

literature

• Ryszard Wójcik: Kapryśna gwiazda Rudolfa Weigla. Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Gdańskiego, Gdansk 2015, ISBN 978-83-7865-308-0 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ John DC Bennett, Lydia Tyszczuk: Deception by immunization, revisited British Medical Journal 1990, Volume 301, Issue 22-29 . December 1990, pages 1471-1472
2. ^ Ernst Klee : German Medicine in the Third Reich. Careers before and after 1945. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2001, ISBN 3-10-039310-4 , p. 320 f.
3. ↑ Rudolf Weigl - Entry at Yad Vashem (English)