The Two Men Credited With Saving More Lives Than Anyone Else
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The chances are that you have not heard of this life saving duo, but they are estimated to have saved over one billion lives.
Perhaps the best known contender for the accolade of 'greatest life saver' is Scottish microbiologist Sir Alexander Fleming, who arguably made the most spectacular accidental discovery of all time after he famously returned from holiday in 1928 to find that one of his Petri dishes of bacteria had been contaminated with mould.
Noticing that there was a bacteria-free zone around the mould, he realised that it must be releasing a substance that inhibited bacterial growth. He discovered that the substance, which he named penicillin, could kill a variety of harmful bacteria. But he struggled to isolate and purify it for medical use. Over a decade later, Australian pharmacologist Prof Howard Florey, along with colleagues, finally managed to purify penicillin, and the antibiotic has since saved over 200 million lives.
But Fleming and Florey's remarkable life-saving discovery is greatly eclipsed by Austrian American biologist Professor Karl Landsteiner, thanks to his insight at the start of the 20th century. Before the First World War, injuries and illnesses that caused significant blood loss were often fatal. Doctors had tried to perform blood transfusions, but many patients suffered a deadly reaction to the donor blood. In 1901, Landsteiner worked out why. He discovered that different people have blood with different characteristics - now known as blood groups - which made their blood incompatible. His breakthrough paved the way for successful blood transfusions.
But it wasn’t until 1914, when Belgian physician Albert Hustin discovered a technique to prevent blood from clotting during storage and transportation, that this vital medical procedure became practical.
The pair are credited with saving over a billion lives worldwide. Landsteiner received the 1930 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his discovery of the major blood groups and the development of the ABO system of blood typing that has made blood transfusion a routine medical practice.
