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Karl Landsteiner

 

The 1930 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Karl Landsteiner
Born: June 14, 1868, Vienna, Austrian Empire (now Austria)
Died: June 26, 1943 in New York, NY, USA
Affiliation at the time of award: Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, New York, NY, USA
Award motivation: "For his discovery of human blood groups."
Price share: 1/1

Karl Landsteiner


Work

Karl Landsteiner - Blood Donation


If a person loses a lot of blood from an accident or illness, it needs to be replaced. However, when person-to-person transfusions were attempted, the results were very often disastrous. Karl Landsteiner discovered why: When the blood of different people was mixed, the blood cells sometimes coagulated. He explained in 1901 that people have different types of blood cells, that is, there are different blood types. The discovery led to blood transfusions between people with compatible blood types.