Last update:
08-Sep-2020

Proper selection of the organ to be transplanted requires a series of tests and determines the effectiveness of the treatment. The selection is preceded by a series of tests performed between the donor and recipient: pre-selection according to blood group, human leukocyte antigens (HLA), panel reactive antibody (PRA) and crossmatch. Of course, the first condition is the compliance of blood types between the donor and the recipient. In 1901, Karl Landsteiner discovered that human blood had different properties and distinguished three blood groups: A, B, and C. In 1910–1911, Emil von Dungern and Ludwik Hirszfeld discovered the Mendelian inheritance of blood types. Their division into four basic groups A, B, AB and O has been used since 1928. The same researchers found subtypes A1 and A2 within type A. Ludwik Hirszfeld (1884–1954) was born in Warsaw and studied medicine in Würzburg. In 1907, he received a doctorate at the University of Berlin and moved to the Cancer Research Centre in Heidelberg and, in 1911, to the University of Zurich. As a volunteer in World War I in Serbia, he fought a typhus epidemic. In 1918–1919, with his wife Hanna, he researched and described the uneven distribution of blood type features that reflects the diverse evolutionary adaptations of humans. In the 1920s, he co-founded the National Institute of Hygiene in Warsaw. During World War II, he spent two years in the Warsaw ghetto, where he fought infectious diseases, typhus and tuberculosis. After the war, he headed the Department of Medical Microbiology at Maria Skłodowska-Curie University in Lublin. In 1945, he worked in Wrocław as the Head of the Department of Microbiology. He died in Wroclaw. Ludwik Hirszfeld was an outstanding medical doctor, researcher and community activist. The importance of Hirszfeld's contribution to our knowledge of the blood type system was confirmed by Karl Landsteiner in his Nobel Address, by choosing Hirszfeld to the Presidency of the Blood Group of the Second International Congress of Blood Transfusion in Paris in 1937 and by naming after him the Institute of Immunology and Experimental Therapy of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Wrocław.

Key words: Blood type, Ludwik Hirszfeld, Organ transplant.