Karl Landsteiner showed that polio is caused by a virus

Person: Karl Landsteiner
Lived: 1868–1943
Field: Pathology
From: Austrian-American

The story

At the start of the twentieth century, poliomyelitis was paralysing children across Europe and North America, but nobody knew what caused it. Karl Landsteiner, already known for discovering the human blood groups, had been appointed prosector at the Wilhelminenspital in Vienna in 1908. He had spent the previous decade in the university's pathology department, where he carried out thousands of autopsies and studied infections such as syphilis.

Working with Erwin Popper, he prepared material from the spinal cords of children who had died of polio and injected it into monkeys, which then developed the disease. Their paper, published in 1909 under the title Transmission of acute poliomyelitis to monkeys, proved that polio was infectious, and the agent they had transmitted was the poliovirus, isolated here for the first time.

Monkeys were scarce in Vienna, so Landsteiner went to the Pasteur Institute in Paris, where animals were available, and continued the work with Constantin Levaditi. The Nobel Foundation's biography says this research, together with work done independently by Simon Flexner and Paul Lewis, laid the foundations of knowledge about the cause and immunology of polio.

Identifying the virus was the first step on a long road. Scientists could now study how it spread, how the body fought it, and eventually how to protect against it. In 1958 a team at Birkbeck College led by Rosalind Franklin used X-ray methods to reveal the structure of the virus. The vaccines later developed by Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin built on the research that began with Landsteiner and Popper's monkeys.

In recognition of the discovery, Landsteiner was posthumously inducted into the Polio Hall of Fame at Warm Springs, Georgia, dedicated in January 1958. Since 1988 a global eradication campaign led by WHO, UNICEF and Rotary has driven polio close to extinction: two of the three wild types of the virus have been declared eradicated, and wild cases now survive in only a few places.

Why it matters

Identifying the poliovirus was the essential first step toward the vaccines of Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin that brought the disease close to eradication.