Karl Landsteiner

In 1916, Karl Landsteiner married Leopoldine Helene Wlasto, who converted from her Greek Orthodox faith to her husband’s adopted religion of Roman Catholicism. Their only child, a son named Ernst Karl, was born the following year.

With his family, he relocated to New York City to take a job at the ‘Rockefeller Institute’ in 1923; he was granted American citizenship five years later.

On June 24, 1943, Landsteiner had a heart attack in his laboratory at the ‘Rockefeller Institute’ in New York where he continued research even after his retirement. He passed away in the hospital two days later.

Karl Landsteiner was born on June 14, 1868, in Vienna, Austria, as the only child of the famed journalist, lawyer and newspaper publisher, Leopold Landsteiner, and his wife, Fanny Hess.

At the age of six, Karl’s father passed away, leading him to develop a very close relationship with his mother, which lasted throughout his life.

He proved himself to be a brilliant student in his youth and was permitted to begin studies at the ‘University of Austria’ in 1885, when he was just seventeen years old.

He graduated from the ‘University of Austria’ with a degree in medicine in 1891, although he chose to become a research scientist instead of a medical practitioner, feeling the future of medicine was in research.

Although he was born Jewish, he converted to Catholicism in 1890, because during time in the Austrian-Hungarian Empire only Catholics could become professors.

In 1891, Karl Landsteiner published his first scientific work, a paper about the influence of diet on the composition of blood ash.

From 1891-1893, Landsteiner immersed himself in the study of chemistry, studying under Arthur Rudolf Hantzsch, Hermann Emil Fisher, and Eugen Bamberger in their labs in Zurich, Wurzburg and Munchen, respectively.

In 1896 he became an assistant to well-known bacteriologist Max von Gruber at the ‘Hygienic Institute of Vienna’, where he concentrated his studies on the natures of immunity and antibodies.

From November 1897 to 1908, he was an assistant under Anton Weischelbaum at the pathological-anatomical institute of the ‘University of Vienna’.

In 1901, Karl made his groundbreaking discovery that, contrary to the previously held belief that all humans’ blood was the same, there are actually four different blood groups and three different blood types.

He published his groundbreaking paper detailing the different human blood groups in 1901, which was entitled ‘On agglutination phenomena of normal human blood’.

In 1936, he published his seminal work about the immune system entitled ‘The Specificity of the Serologic Reactions’, a book which is still considered a classic in its field.