Nobel Prize Recipient. Dr. Karl Landsteiner, an Austrian-born American immunologist and pathologist, received international recognition after being awarded the 1930 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. He was given the covet award, according to the Nobel Prize committee, "for his discovery of human blood groups." In 1900 he developed the ABO system of blood typing that has made blood transfusion a routine in today’s medical practice with blood compatibility for safe blood transfusions. He had seventeen candidacy Nobel nominations in ten years. Born into a Jewish family, his father was an educated man, who became a journalist and newspaper publisher and editor. When Landsteiner was six years old, his father died, and he became devoted to his widowed mother. As an honor student during his early education with an interest in science and mathematics, he began studying medicine at the University of Vienna in 1885 and earned an M.D. in 1891. Landsteiner converted from Judaism to Roman Catholicism in 1890. While studying medicine, he became very interested in blood chemistry. After graduation, he spent the next five years doing biochemical research in prominent laboratories under the guidance of well-known European scientists; one was the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1902, Emil Fischer. Upon returning to Vienna in 1896, he continued to study medicine at the Vienna General Hospital becoming an assistant at the Hygiene Institute to Dr. Max von Gruber, who is credited for discovering agglutination of blood, immunology , typhoid fever and a host of other interests. From November 1897 to 1908 he was an assistant at the pathological-anatomical institute of the University of Vienna and during this time, published 75 papers and preformed 3,500 autopsies. He discovered new facts about the immunology of syphilis, added to the knowledge of the Wassermann reaction. He was the first to isolate the bacteria Treponema pallidum or the syphilitic spirochete in a blood specimen in the dark field of the microscope. From 1908 to 1920 Landsteiner was prosector, or the person who prepared the body for dissection, at the Wilhelminenspital in Vienna. He and two scientists discovered the polio virus in 1909 and after going to Pasteur Institute in Paris, where monkeys were available, he studied how this virus was transmitted. In 1911 he became Professor of Pathological Anatomy in the University of Vienna, yet without receiving the corresponding salary. After World War I from 1919 to 1922, he was at the Roman Catholic Hospital at The Hague doing research and publishing twelve papers on a host of subjects including anaphylaxis. While in the Netherlands, he was offered a position at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York, which he accepted. He studied blood groups while there, discovering the Rh-factor in blood. In 1939, he was granted Emeritus Professor at the Rockefeller Institute, but continued his research in the laboratories. During this period, he became an American citizen. Besides the Nobel Prize, he was awarded the Aronson Prize from Germany in 1926 and posthumously in 1946, awarded the Lasker Award from the United States. In 1916 he married an actress and had a son, who became a physician. In January of 1958 he was inducted in the Polio Hall of Fame at Warm Springs, Georgia. His bronze bust is one of seventeen mounted on the wall outside of the Roosevelt Warm Springs Institute for Rehabilitation. He received honorary doctorates from the University of Chicago in 1927, Cambridge in 1934, the Free University of Brussels in 1934, and Harvard in 1936. While still active in the research laboratory, he died of a sudden heart attack.