Karl Landsteiner

They were getting closer to something, and then the entire line of inquiry was abandoned, not because it was disproven through rigorous experiment, because it was replaced by something faster.

In 1901, a thirty-two-year-old pathologist named Karl Landsteiner sat in his laboratory at the University of Vienna with six blood samples, his own and five from his colleagues.

He mixed serum from one person with red blood cells from another and watched what happened.

Some samples clumped together, others did not.

If your school taught standardized diagnosis and pharmaceutical intervention, the money arrived.

Now, here is the part that no one mentions in the same conversation.

Karl Landsteiner left Vienna in 1923 and moved to New York.

He spent the rest of his career at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research.

They didn't know about blood types yet.

Karl Landsteiner didn't discover the ABO blood group system until 1900, which is three years after this book was published.

You are exactly right.

It was a highly experimental, incredibly dangerous procedure.

So it's interesting 'cause probably a lot of people reacted badly or even died after a transfusion, yet science kept going, and they got it figured out.

So in the 1900s to 1910s, they in, uh, they discovered blood typing, and that's usually credited to a guy named Karl Landsteiner who discovered the ABO blood groups in the year 1900.

That's so curious how they actually discovered that, right? I mean, that is an interesting one to figure out.

How did they-

This is an era before antibiotics.

Blood typing had only been discovered about a decade prior by Karl Landsteiner.

And transfusions were still incredibly experimental, often done direct vein to vein, and highly deadly if the blood wasn't compatible.

Hemorrhaging in a country manor in the middle of the night meant a most certain death.

None of that existed.

Karl Landsteiner wouldn't identify the main human blood groups until 1900 and 1901.

More than 80 years in the future.

And practical blood matching and cross-matching came later still.