Tag Archives: immunology

Questioning immunology and the soul

August 3, 2022

Vani Ghai Pune, India   Healing ulcers on the lower leg. The ulceration may have been due to varicose veins. Watercolor drawing by S. A. Sewell. Wellcome Collection. CC BY 4.0. The long and tiring battle with COVID has stimulated modern medicine to investigate new approaches to understanding the science of immunity. It has long […]

Karl Landsteiner and the discovery of blood groups

February 11, 2020

Safia Benaissa Mostganem, Algeria   Karl Landsteiner (1868–1943), Austrian pathologist, hematologist and serologist; discoverer of the blood groups. Albert Hilscher. circa 1910. Accessed via Wikimedia Commons Karl Landsteiner was the Austrian scientist who recognized that humans had different blood groups and made it possible for physicians to transfuse blood safely. He entered medical school at […]

Anne McLaren, transfusion, transplantation, and the nature of blood

February 6, 2020

Matthew Holmes Cambridge, UK   What happened during a transfusion or transplantation between different individuals, or even members of different species? For centuries some thought that hereditable characteristics might cross between individuals or species in this manner. This belief found fresh impetus in Marxist biology during the Cold War. Anne McLaren, Oxford-trained zoologist and first […]

Grandfather of allergy: Dr. Bill Frankland, the ardent centenarian

May 20, 2019

John Turner United Kingdom   Captain A. W. Frankland Image credit Paul Watkins Research for Far East Prisoners of War History Group Fepowhistory.com “For your final choice?” Dr. William Frankland at one hundred and three, the oldest guest ever to appear in the London studio of the BBC’s Desert Island Discs, chose Elgar’s Nimrod in […]

The early days of the Nobel Prize and Golden Age of Microbiology

February 1, 2017

Juan–Carlos Argüelles Murcia, Spain   Introduction According to Alfred Nobel’s (1833–1896) last will and testament, signed on November 27, 1895, the largest share of his fortune would be dedicated to a series of awards bestowed on those people who deserved great merit for their intensive work in favor of mankind. That year the Nobel Prize […]