Karl Landsteiner and the first human marker locus

Abstract

Just a century ago, the year of the rediscovery of Mendelism, Karl Landsteiner published a short note on what we would now call antibody action in human blood serum, with a comment on the agglutination of the red cells of some people by the serum of others (Landsteiner 1900). The following year he elaborated the observation (Landsteiner 1901), and it is to that second short paper that reference is most appropriately made when dating the discovery of the normal human blood groups. As strict constructionists of the millennium would argue, the century began in 1901, not 1900.

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