Karl Landsteiner Karl Landsteiner Karl Landsteiner, , (14 June 1868 – 26 June 1943) was an Austrian biologist, physician, and immunologist. He distinguished the main blood groups in 1900, having developed the modern system of classification of blood groups from his identification of the presence of agglutinins in the blood, and identified, with Alexander S. Wiener, the Rhesus factor, in 1937, thus enabling physicians to transfuse blood without endangering the patient's life. With Constantin Levaditi and Erwin Popper, he discovered the polio virus in 1909. He received the Aronson Prize in 1926. In 1930, he received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or
Karl Landsteiner of these achievements. For his pioneering work, he is recognized as the father of transfusion medicine. After World War I, Vienna and the new republic of Austria as a whole was in a desolate economic state, a situation in which Landsteiner did not see any possibilities to carry on with his research work. He decided to move to The Netherlands and accepted a post as prosector in the small Catholic "St. Joannes de Deo" hospital (now MCH Westeinde) in The Hague and, in order to improve his financial situation also took a job in a small factory, producing old tuberculin