| Rudolf Stefan Weigl | |
|---|---|
Rudolf Weigl in his laboratory |
|
| Born | September 2, 1883 Přerov, Moravia |
| Died | August 11, 1957 (aged 73) |
| Nationality | Polish (ethnic Austrian German) |
| Occupation | Research biologist |
Professor Rudolf Stefan Weigl (September 2, 1883 – August 11, 1957, Zakopane) was a famous Polish biologist and inventor of the first effective vaccine against epidemic typhus. Weigl founded the Weigl Institute in Lwów, Poland (now Lviv, Ukraine), where he did his vaccine-producing research.[1]
Of Austrian ethnic descent, Weigl was born in Přerov, Moravia. His father died in a bicycle accident when he was a child. His mother, Elisabeth Kroesel, married a Polish high school teacher, Józef Trojnar. They moved first to Jasło and then to Lviv where Weigl graduated in 1907 with the degree in Natural Sciences from the department of Biological Sciences at the University of Jan Kazimierz, taught by such renown professors as Benedykt Dybowski (1833 – 1930) and J. Nusbaum-Hilarowicz (1859 – 1917). After graduation, Weigl became Nusbaum's assistant there and was habilitated in 1913 in the comparative zoology and anatomy department.[1]
Following the Soviet and Nazi German invasions of Poland in World War II, the Nazis became quite attentive to Dr. Weigl's research. When they occupied Lviv they ordered him to set up a vaccine production plant at his Institute. About a thousand people worked there. Weigl employed and protected Polish intellectuals, Jews and members of the Polish underground. His vaccines were smuggled into ghettos in Lviv and Warsaw saving countless lives, until the Institute was shut down by the Soviet Union following anti-German offensive of 1944.[2]
Weigl came to Kraków in 1945. He was appointed the Chair of General Microbiology Institute of the Jagiellonian University, and later as the Chair of Biology of the Medical Faculty in Poznań. Production of the vaccine remained in Kraków in the following years until discontinued. Weigl died on August 11, 1957.[1]
The Weigl Institute features prominently in Andrzej Żuławski's 1971 film The Third Part of the Night. In 2003, professor Weigl was posthumously awarded the medal of Righteous Among the Nations of the World by the state of Israel.[3]
In 1930, following the 1909 discovery of Charles Nicolle that lice were the vector of epidemic typhus and on the work for the vaccine for the closely related Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, Weigl took the next step and developed a technique to produce the vaccine by growing infected lice and crushing them into a vaccine paste. He refined this technique over the years until 1933 when he performed large-scale testing. The method specifically broke into 4 major steps:
Growing lice meant feeding them blood, the more human the better. At first he tested his method on Guinea pigs but around 1933 he commenced large-scale testing on humans, feeding the lice on human blood by letting them suck on human legs through a screen. This could cause typhus during the latter phase, when the lice were infected. He alleviated this problem by vaccinating the human "injectors" heavily, which successfully protected them from death (though some did develop the disease). [4] Dr. Weigl himself developed the disease, but recovered.
The first major application of this vaccine took place between 1936 and 1943 by the Belgian missionaries in China. The vaccine was dangerous to produce and was hard to make on a large scale. Other vaccines were developed over time that were less dangerous and more economical to produce, including the Cox vaccine developed from egg yolk.
|
|||||||||||||||||