THE medical research giant whose work has touched and benefited nearly every human being was Dr Karl Landsteiner. He discovered the different blood groups, thus opening the way to blood transfusion which saves millions of lives.

Karl was born in Austria in 1868. His father was a journalist. Karl graduated from medical school and spent another four years studying chemistry. He joined the University of Vienna and began working on blood. Blood mystified him and became his lifelong interest.

Since centuries doctors had been working on blood transfusion. In certain cases the results were so terrifying that many countries like France and England eventually prohibited experiments on transfusion. Most medical men claimed that all blood was alike and transfusion disasters were a result of the diseased blood of the donor. But Karl was not convinced, he collected blood samples, experimented, studied the results under a microscope and kept recording the results. He drew charts and finally came to the conclusion that all blood samples were not alike. He had found that some red cells contained a substance which he termed as A and some had a different stuff that he termed as B, while some contained neither, which he termed as O — meaning nought. But nought began to get read as the letter O. Karl could not discover the fourth category AB — as the sample that he had worked on did not have that particular blood group.

In 1919, Landsteiner underwent a period of great financial constraint. World War I had caused chaos and inflation. Karl didn’t even have enough money to buy bread and milk for his family. There were no laboratory supplies and no work. When he got an offer of a very insignificant job in a hospital, he grabbed it as he needed the money. It was a routine job of testing blood and urine. Finally he was invited to head the research laboratory at Rockfeller Institute in New York. Here he did further research on blood. He and his young assistant Philip Levine found three more blood factors — M,N,P. These are not as important as A and B but help in legal medicine, for instance in identifying blood stains, and establishing paternity. As research continued Karl and his co-scientists discovered the Rh factor — the basis of the blood incompatibility which had caused the mysterious deaths of thousands of infants in the womb or soon after birth.

In 1930, Karl won the Nobel Prize for medicine for his work in blood-typing. Completely devoted to his work, Karl worked everyday from nine to five in the laboratory and then for another five hours after dinner.

Karl also explained the mechanism of skin allergies. Further, his research on certain microbes opened the way for vaccines that prevented typhus and spotted fever. Almost single-handedly he founded and developed the science of immuno-chemistry. Even at the age of 75 years, Karl kept a busy schedule. On June 24, 1943, he suffered a massive heart attack and died two days later. He left behind his valuable research work that has benefited all humanity.

History of blood research

SCIENTIFIC interest in blood probably began with the Greek physician Hippocrates, who lived during the 400’s and 300’s B.C. He proposed that all diseases resulted from an imbalance of four humours (body fluids) — black bile, blood, phlegm, and yellow bile. The theory led to bloodletting — the drawing of blood from a vein of a sick person so the disease would flow out with the blood. For many centuries, bloodletting was standard medical treatment. Barbers performed the procedure during the Middle Ages. In the late 1700’s and early 1800’s, a number of doctors prescribed bloodletting and caused many patients to die of excessive blood loss.

In 1628, the English physician William Harvey described how blood circulates through the body. His work became the basis for later discoveries about the functions of blood.

In 1882, Elie Metchnikoff, a Russian biologist, discovered phagocytosis. His achievement helped explain how white blood cells kill germs. Also in 1882, an Italian biologist named Guillo Bizzozero was the first to correctly describe the function of platelets and relate them to the clotting of blood.

As knowledge of blood components grew, interest in transfusions increased. Doctors first transfused blood directly from donors into patients. Most of the attempts failed. Then in the early 1900’s, Karl Landsteiner, an Austrian-born immunologist working in the USA discovered the ABO blood types. Cross-matching blood types of donors and patients led to a dramatic increase in successful transfusions. In 1940, Landsteiner and a colleague, Alexander S. Wiener, an American scientist, discovered theRh factor.

The storage of blood became possible in 1914, with the addition of nutrients and of chemicals that checked clotting. The first voluntary blood-donor scheme was started in London in 1921. In 1936, the world’s first blood bank opened at Cook County Hospital in Chicago. During World War II (1939-1945), donated blood saved the lives of many military and civilian casualties. Surgeons also turned to the use of plasma, which at that time could be stored longer than whole blood, for battlefield and other emergency transfusions.

During the 1980s, some hospitals began urging patients awaiting non-emergency operations to bank their own blood. In this banking procedure, the patient’s blood is collected and stored for a few weeks before the operation, ready for use if needed. Return of the patient’s own blood in this way is known as autologous transfusion.

Scientists today are working to develop blood substitutes or artificial blood that could replace human blood transfusions. Such research is very important because, even with strict precautions, transfusions involve a risk of reactions and the transmission of viruses and other infections through donated blood.

Other current research involves producing and testing the haematopoietic growth factors responsible for the formation of all blood cells. Many of the growth factors are available in large quantities for testing in patients. They are being used in patients who lack enough red blood cells, white blood cells, or platelets. This search into growth factors offers hope of a better life for countless people.