Philip Levine (physician)

Philip Levine (August 10, 1900 – October 18, 1987) was an imuno-hematologist whose clinical research advanced knowledge on the Rhesus factor, Hemolytic disease of the newborn (HDN) and blood transfusion.

Levine was born in Kletsk, near Minsk (now in Belarus), then in the Russian Empire. He moved with his family to New York when he was 8 years old where his family took on a more English sounding surname. The family settled in Brooklyn where Levine graduated from Boys' High School. He received a bachelor's degree at City College and a master's degree and, in 1923, an M.D. degree at Cornell University Medical School. About 1925 Levine became assistant to Karl Landsteiner at the Rockefeller Institute, New York City. In 1932 he took up research work on the bacteriophage at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Back in the east in 1935, he worked as a bacteriologist and serologist at Newark Beth Israel Hospital, New Jersey where, in 1939, Levine and Rufus E. Stetson published their findings about a family who had a stillborn baby in 1937 who had died of hemolytic disease of the newborn. This publication included the first suggestion that a mother could make blood group antibodies owing to immune sensitization to her fetus's red blood cells.
In 1944 Levine started a centre for blood group research at the Ortho Research Foundation, Raritan, New Jersey.