Karl Landsteiner, ForMemRS, (14 June 1868 – 26 June 1943) was an Austrian biologist, physician, and immunologist. He distinguished the main blood groups in 1900, having developed the modern system of classification of blood groups from his identification of the presence of agglutinins in the blood, and identified, with Alexander S. Wiener, the Rhesus factor, in 1937, thus enabling physicians to transfuse blood without endangering the patient’s life. With Constantin Levaditi and Erwin Popper, he discovered the polio virus in 1909. He received the Aronson Prize in 1926. In 1930, he received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. He was posthumously awarded the Lasker Award in 1946, and has been described as the father of transfusion medicine.
The rhesus blood type named after the rhesus monkey was first discovered in 1937 by Karl Landsteiner and Alexander S. Wiener. The significance of the discovery was not immediately apparent and was only realized in 1940, after subsequent findings by Philip Levine and Rufus Stetson. This serum that led to the discovery was produced by immunizing rabbits with red blood cells from a rhesus macaque. The antigen that induced this immunization was designated by them as Rh factor to indicate that rhesus blood had been used for the production of the serum.