Ludwik Hirszfeld
| Ludwik Hirszfeld | |
|---|---|
Ludwik Hirszfeld, microbiologist and serologist (1954)
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| Born | 5 August 1884 |
| Died | 7 March 1954 (aged 69) |
| Residence |
 Poland
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| Nationality |
Polish
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| Fields | Microbiology, Serology |
| Known for | discoverery of the inheritance of ABO blood type |
Ludwik Hirszfeld (5 August 1884 in Warsaw – 7 March 1954 in Wrocław) was a Polish microbiologist and serologist. He is considered a co-discoverer of the inheritance of ABO blood types.
Shortly after World War I, in Poland, he established a laboratory of experimental medicine at the State Institute of Hygiene.
In 1946 he published his autobiography, The Story of One Life.
He was a cousin of Aleksander Rajchman, a Polish mathematician, and of Ludwik Rajchman, a Polish bacteriologist.
After attending the Gymnasium in Łódź, Hirszfeld, born into a Jewish family and later a convert to Catholicism, decided to study medicine in Germany. In 1902 he entered the University of Würzburg and transferred in 1904 to Berlin, where he attended lectures in medicine and philosophy. Hirszfeld completed his doctoral dissertation, "Über Blutagglutination," in 1907, thus taking the first step in what was to become his specialty. But first he became a junior assistant in cancer research at the Heidelberg Institute for Experimental Cancer Research, where E. von Dungern was his department head. Hirszfeld soon formed a close personal friendship with Dungern which proved to be scientifically fruitful. At Heidelberg they did the first joint work on animal and human blood groups which, in 1900, had been identified as isoagglutinins by Karl Landsteiner.
Hirszfeld gradually found the working conditions at Heidelberg too confining and to familiarize himself with the entire field of hygiene and microbiology, in 1911 he accepted an assistantship at the Hygiene Institute of the University of Zurich, just after he had married. His wife, also a physician, became an assistant at the Zurich Children's Clinic under Emil Feer.
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