Six Offprints on Immunochemistry, Inscribed to Hans Sachs

1925. First Edition. Landsteiner received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1930 for his discovery of the human blood groups, a finding whose practical consequences (the safety of blood transfusion, the foundations of forensic serology, the understanding of hemolytic disease of the newborn) have made it one of the most consequential contributions in the history of medicine. But the blood group work was only one episode in a scientific career of exceptional range and depth. Over four decades, working first in Vienna and then, from 1922, at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York, Landsteiner pursued a systematic program of research into the chemical basis of immunological specificity: into the question of how the immune system discriminates between substances of closely related molecular structure, and what features of chemical constitution determine whether a substance will provoke an immune response and how precisely that response will be targeted. The six offprints offered here, all inscribed by Landsteiner to the Frankfurt serologist Hans Sachs, span the years 1903 to 1925 and document the program from its early Vienna investigations through the fully elaborated immunochemical work of the Rockefeller years. Sachs was himself a major figure in immunology, a close associate of Paul Ehrlich and the developer, with Georgi, of the widely used complement-fixation test for syphilis, and the fact that Landsteiner sent him these papers over more than two decades reflects a relationship between two of the leading immunologists of the era. The six items move from early investigations of the physical chemistry of antigen-antibody reactions and the behavior of colloidal model systems, through quantitative comparative studies of agglutination and lysis, to the sustained program of hapten chemistry culminating in the 1918 paper with Lampl, one of the founding documents of immunochemistry, and the 1925 investigation of lipoid antigens in red blood corpuscles carried out at the Rockefeller Institute. Together they trace, in presentation copies from Landsteiner's own hand, the central arc of a research program that transformed immunology from a descriptive biological science into a discipline grounded in organic chemistry. (1) Landsteiner, Karl and Jagić, N. Ueber die Verbindungen und die Entstehung von Immunkörpern; from the Münchener medizinische Wochenschrift, Vol. 50, No. 18, pp. 764-768. Munich: J.F. Lehmann, 1903. Offprint, 8vo (231 x 155mm), pp. 15, [1].

(2) Landsteiner, Karl and Jagić, N. Ueber Analogien der Wirkungen kolloidaler Kieselsäure mit den Reaktionen der Immunkörper und verwandter Stoffe; from Wiener klinischen Wochenschrift, Jahrgang, Vol. 70, Nr. 3, pp. 63-64. Wien and Leipzig: Wilhelm Braumüller, 1904. Offprint, 8vo (227 x 139mm), pp. 3, [1].

(3) Landsteiner, Karl and Eisler, M. Ueber Agglutinin- und Lysinwirkung; from the Centralblatt für Bakteriologie, Parasitenkunde und Infektionskrankheiten, Bd. XXXIX, Heft 3, pp 309-319. Jena: Hermann Pohle, 1905. Offprint, 8vo (235 x 158mm), pp. 11, [1].

(4) Landsteiner, Karl. Über die Ätiologie der Polymyositis; Särtryck from Sv. Läk.-Sällsk. Handlingar, pp. 759-774. Stockholm: Isaac Marcus, 1917. Offprint, 8vo (257 x 184mm), pp. 16.

(5) Landsteiner, Karl and Lampl, H. Uber die Abhängigkeit der serologischen Spezifizität von der chemischen Struktur. (Darstellung von Antigen mit bekannter chemischer Konstitution der spezifischen Gruppen). XII. Mitteilung uber Antigene; from the Biochemische Zeitschrift, Bd. 86. Berlin: Julius Springer, 1918. Offprint, 8vo (232 x 157mm), pp. 52, plus 2 inserted fold-out tables.

(6) Landsteiner, Karl and van der Scheer, J. On the Antigens of Red Blood Corpuscles. The Question of Lipoid Antigens; from The Journal of Experimental Medicine, Vol. xli, No. 3, pp 427-437. Baltimore: Waverly Press, Inc., 1925. Offprint, 8vo (255 x 176mm), pp. 11, [1].

Individual papers fully described HERE.