Rudolf Stefan Weigl

Rudolf Stefan Weigl
Rudolf Weigl in his laboratory
Born	(1883-09-02)2 September 1883 Prerau, Austria-Hungary
Died	11 August 1957(1957-08-11) (aged 73) Zakopane, Poland
Nationality	Polish
Occupation	Research biologist

Rudolf Stefan Weigl (2 September 1883 – 11 August 1957) was a Polish biologist and inventor of the first effective vaccine against epidemic typhus. He founded the Weigl Institute in Lviv, where he conducted vaccine research.

There, during the Holocaust, he harbored Jews, thereby risking execution by the Germans. His vaccines were also smuggled into the Lwów Ghetto and the Warsaw Ghetto, saving countless additional Jewish lives.

Weigl was born in Prerau (now Přerov), Moravia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, to Austrian-German parents. When he was a child, his father died in a bicycle accident. His mother, Elisabeth Kroesel, married a Polish secondary-school teacher, Józef Trojnar, and they raised Weigl in Jasło, Poland.

Later the family moved to Lviv (Lwów in Polish, Lemberg in German), where in 1907 Weigl graduated from the biology department at the University of Jan Kazimierz, where he had been a pupil of Professors Benedykt Dybowski (1833–1930) and J. Nusbaum–Hilarowicz (1859–1917). After graduation, Weigl became Nusbaum's assistant and in 1913 completed his habilitacja in the department of comparative zoology and anatomy.

After the outbreak of World War I in 1914 Weigl was drafted into the medical service of the Austro-Hungarian army and began research on typhus and its causes. Weigl worked at a military hospital in Przemyśl, where he supervised the Laboratory for the Study of Spotted Typhus.

During the Nazi German occupation of Poland in World War II, Weigl's research attracted the attention of the Nazis. When they occupied Lviv, they ordered him to set up a vaccine production plant at his Institute. About a thousand people worked there. Weigl employed and protected Polish intellectuals, Jews and members of the Polish underground. His vaccines were smuggled into ghettos in Lviv and Warsaw, saving countless lives, until the Institute was shut down by the Soviet Union following their 1944 anti-German offensive.