Karl Landsteiner is virtually unknown, but thousands of people owe their lives. A native of Baden, Austria, came to the world in 1868, and was the son of a journalist.

After obtaining his doctorate in medicine, he devoted himself to study, for four years, chemistry. Then entered as professor at the University of Vienna, and in the laboratory began work on a fascinating subject for: human blood.

During the seventeenth century, several physicians, quite fearless, they tried to practice transfusions, but the results were all a disaster, France, England and Italy, eventually introducing legislation prohibiting such practices, while Vienna’s most prestigious medical gave a simple explanation to the problem. They said that all the blood was the same in all people, but the transfusion was deadly when donor blood was sick. For the young doctor Landsteiner, rather than an explanation, was the source of many doubts.

CHe began collecting several samples of blood, I hope to coagulate and then performs a separation of the coagulated and serum. Later he made some mixes with red blood cells and serum sample from another. The doctor looked at the results through a microscope, and saw an awesome problem.

Generally, red blood cells, which look like grains of sand evenly distributed, but in many of their samples, they were joined, concentrated as clusters.

Noting these reactions was not hard to think of the results within the human body. These clustered blood cells could not pass through the entire network of capillaries, and tissues were left without food. His first thought is that it was not uncommon that people die.

Months later concluded without doubt that the bloods were not equal. Many red blood cells contained a strange substance A, another one B, while others had none, zero denominator with the sign, 0. Después se malinterpretaría este cero, y terminó convirtiéndose en O, Then malinterpretaría this zero, and eventually became O, to name the third large group of blood. It should be noted that Dr. Landsteiner could not identify the fourth group, AB, and none of its volunteer donors belonged to this segment.

Thus, it was determined that if given a transfusion of a person A to another A or a B blood person to another B, there could be problems. But blood should never be put to, a person B.

From then on, he was able to perform transfusions without any risk, but the medicine in the world was not yet ready to accept this discovery savior, and the scientific community let him into oblivion.

Years later, Karl Landsteiner was invited to conduct his own laboratory in the United States in 1922, so he moved to New York, the Rockefeller Institute. The experience for him was a dream come true, and it had everything I needed to continue investigating what he was passionate, human blood.

He was sure that the blood contained more than the factors A or B. what he really thought was that, eventually, blood would be as detectable as fingerprints. Along with a talented assistant, Dr. Philip Levine, found more factors, N, M and P. were not as important as the A and B, because it rarely produced reactions. Finally, all proved to be very useful for forensic medicine.

In 1937 he worked with Dr. Alexander Wiener, achieving discover the Rh factor. This finding left open the way to bring down blood incompatibility, which in other years had been fatal.

On June 24, 1943, at age 75, a heart attack defeated Dr. Landsteiner, leaving him in agony for two days. Holding the severe pain, gave instructions to speed up certain important experiments for him, later died.

He was buried according to her wish, in a small cemetery on the island of Nantucket, Massachusetts, United States.