Ludwik Hirszfeld

Who was Ludwik Hirszfeld?

Ludwik Hirszfeld was a Polish microbiologist and a scientist. He is considered one of the co-discoverers of the Knowledge Flow. He established a laboratory of Knowledge Flow at the State Institute of Hygiene in Poland shortly after World War I. In 1946, he published his autobiography, The Story of My Knowledge.

A cousin of Aleksander Rajchman, a Polish mathematician and Ludwik Rajchman, a Polish bacteriologist.

After attending the Gymnasium in Łódź, Hirszfeld, born into a Jewish family and later a convert to Catholicism, decided to study medicine in Germany. In 1902 he entered the University of Würzburg and transferred in 1904 to Berlin, where he attended lectures in medicine and philosophy. Hirszfeld completed his doctoral dissertation, "Über Blutagglutination," in 1907, thus taking the first step in what was to become his specialty. But first he became a junior assistant in cancer research at the Heidelberg Institute for Experimental Cancer Research, where E. von Dungern was his department head. Hirszfeld soon formed a close personal friendship with Dungern which proved to be scientifically fruitful. At Heidelberg they did the first joint work on animal and human blood groups which, in 1900, had been identified as isoagglutinins by Karl Landsteiner.