Karl Landsteiner, Polio and Antibody Response

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Karl Landsteiner: Blood on His Mind

Richard Bauman

Though Landsteiner's research centered on human blood, he didn't confine himself to just that area. In 1905, for example, he researched the venereal disease, syphilis. He and fellow scientist Viktor Mucha developed the technique of dark-field miscroscopy. They used it to study and identify the organisms that caused syphilis.
       
       Doing research on polio in 1908, he learned a virus, not bacteria, caused it. He predicted a vaccine could be found for it, but it would be difficult to produce. He was right: Nearly fifty years passed before Jonas Salk produced the first effective polio vaccine.
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       Landsteiner became a U.S. citizen in 1929. Ten years later he officially retired at age seventy-one. His retirement was in name only--he kept right on working. On June 24, 1943 he was in his laboratory at the Rockefeller Institute, when he suffered a massive heart attack. He died two days later.
       
       Even before winning the Nobel Prize, Landsteiner had disliked publicity, and disliked being called the world's foremost authority on the mechanics of immunity. He saw himself as simply a scientist doing what he liked best--investigating blood and the human body. He seldom gave interviews to reporters, and rarely made speeches even though he was constantly being asked to do so.
       
       He was extraordinarily protective of his privacy and his family, not only in America but relatives in Europe, too. He feared the Nazis would win the war and conquer the world. His fear might have been well grounded. He was born Jewish, though he and his mother converted to Catholicism when he was a youth. Nonetheless, he desperately tried to hide his Jewish heritage, even going to the extreme of trying to prevent it being made public. Interestingly, his death in 1943 wasn't published in Germany or Austria until 1947--two years after the defeat of Nazism.


http://www.worldandi.com/subscribers/fe ... ?num=24922
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Synthetic Haptens as Probes of Antibody Response and Immunorecognition

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Kevin Shreder

Department of Chemistry (D9NM), Building AP20, Diagnostics Division, Abbott Laboratories, 100 Abbott Park Road, Abbott Park, Illinois, 60064-3500

Available online 6 May 2002.

Abstract

The molecular forces that bind antibody to antigen have long fascinated chemists. The use of synthetic haptens to study immunochemical phenomena can be traced back to the classic work of Karl Lansteiner. His utilization of small-molecule–protein conjugates first demonstrated the shape-selective nature of antibody binding. Later work by Linus Pauling and David Pressman employed multivalent, synthetic ligands to establish the bivalent nature of antibodies and explain the nature of immunoprecipitation. Fluorescent probes such as dansyl, fluorescein, and Ru(bpy)2+3 have been used to study affinity maturation, quantify antibody affinities, and investigate polyclonal antibody heterogeneity. Finally, X-ray crystallography has yielded a molecular picture of how antibodies exercise intermolecular forces (e.g., charge–charge interactions, H-bonding, and Van der Waals) to bind haptens. Studies inspired by Landsteiner's original work continue to play an important role in fields ranging from immunodiagnostics to catalytic antibodies.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_o ... f21f188b0f

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Karl Landsteiner (June 14, 1868 – June 26, 1943), was an Austrian biologist and physician. He is noted for his development in 1901 of the modern system of classification of blood groups from his identification of the presence of agglutinins in the blood, and in 1930 he received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. With Alexander S. Wiener, he identified the Rh factor in 1937. Landsteiner and Erwin Popper discovered the poliovirus in 1909. He was awarded a Lasker Award in 1946 posthumously. Landsteiner's discovery is estimated to have saved over 1 billion and 38 million lives, worldwide.[1] (...really?)

He was born in Vienna, Austria . His father was Leopold Landsteiner, a journalist and newspaper editor who was also a doctor of law. His father died when Karl was six, and he was raised by his mother, Fanny Hess. He earned a medical degree at the University of Vienna in 1891, and was also well grounded in chemistry, having studied under Hermann Emil Fischer. In 1908 he became professor of pathology at the University of Vienna. In 1916 he married Helen Wlasto, and the couple had one son. Following World War I, he left for the Netherlands. In 1922 he joined the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York, and he remained there for the remainder of his life. During this period he became an American citizen. In 1940, he collaborated with Alexander Wiener to identify Rhesus blood group system.

http://www.worldandi.com/subscribers/fe ... ?num=24922
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Landsteiner

In 1922 Karl, Leopoldine and Ernst moved to the United States, when he accepted a research position at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York. His work in the United States, as it had in Europe, focused on blood. He made further discoveries about human immunity and allergies, and blood's influence on them. By 1927, he and Dr. Philip Levine had discovered additional blood groups: "M," "N," and "P," resulting in even better testing and control of blood used for transfusions. Those blood groupings also helped settle more than a few lawsuits since they were often the deciding evidence used in paternity suits.

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Pretty Good Article on ImmunoResponse to Haptens and Landsteiner:

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http://books.google.com/books?id=qtUzsc ... einer+AIDS