Nobel Prizeman

Dr. Karl Landsteiner, to whom the 1930 Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded last week, need merely walk through the corridors of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in Manhattan, where he does research in immunology, pathology and bacteriology, to shake hands with the only other U. S. winner of the Nobel prize for Medicine--Dr. Alexis Carrel.-- Scoffers at U. S. learning might with a modicum of justice point out that Dr. Carrel is French-born, educated and wived, that Dr. Landsteiner is Austrian-born, educated and wived. Only in Physics and Chemistry have men with a long U. S. background attained Nobel Prize supremacy in the sciences.

The public knows a trifle about Dr. Carrel because, if he did not regularly kill part of the embryonic chicken tissue which he has been growing for 18 years, it would by now (theoretically) more than cover the earth. He won his prize for his success in sewing blood vessels and transplanting organs.

About Dr. Landsteiner, 62, greying, mustached, genial paterfamilias as well as scientist, the public knows nothing. The Encyclopaedia Britannica mentions him not at all. Nor do doctors know much of him. Yet from him have come profound biological revelations.

At Vienna, The Hague and Manhattan he developed the theories of human blood groups--that there are four main types of human blood, with at least 30 subtypes. This has made blood transfusion (by preventing confusion of blood groups) a safe operation. It has permitted an approximate determination of paternity, has enabled criminologists to infer whether or not bloodstains were from the victim, the assaulter, or some other person.

Following up his blood researches Dr. Landsteiner confirmed the contention of zoologists that great apes and humans are more closely related than apes and monkeys or monkeys and men, that the three are branches of remote primitive primates.

Another derivative of his blood knowledge was his establishment of the cause of paroxysmal hemoglobinuria. Cold, chills, mental or bodily exhaustion cause the victims--most often adult males--to have an occasional bloody micturition. Dr. Landsteiner found that the blood serum in this disease develops a poison which causes the all important red blood cells to dissolve and leave the body by way of the kidneys and bladder. It is possible that an antitoxin may be obtained to counteract this self-blood-poisoning.

More fundamental to health than all this blood lore has been Dr. Landsteiner's general immunological studies. He has worked out, for example, certain principles of antibody activity--how the substances which stimulate the blood to produce immune sera are acted upon by the antibodies contained therein. There is a complex chemistry to this activity. Because Dr. Landsteiner has shown what the chemistry is like, doctors now can often stimulate or induce such antipathological processes.

Dr. Landsteiner does not know exactly why he won the Nobel Prize. The award surprised him. Said he last week, nervously smoking cigarets: "I suppose the Nobel Prize was awarded for my work in blood grouping, although full half my experimentation has been in immunology, and it is in that work I am engaged at present." The cash he will get will approximate $48,000. Some one asked him whether he would devote the money to laboratory work or to the stock market. His smiling reply: "If you will tell me what is good to buy. . . ."

*The John Davison Rockefellers are the patrons of not only these men, but also, by their vast endowment of the University of Chicago, of all the other living U. S. winners of Nobel scientific prizes--Albert Abraham Michelson (Physics, 1907), who, 77, resigned last June and now lives in California where he paints water colors while waiting to continue his calculation of light's speed; Arthur Holly Compton (Physics, 1927); and Robert Andrews Millikan (Physics, 1923). who before he went to California Institute of Technology (1921) worked 25 years at the University of Chicago. The late Theodore William Richards (Chemistry, 1914) only other U. S. winner of a Nobel scientific prize, was a Harvard professor.

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