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Rudolf Weigl was a Polish biologist, physician, and inventor known for developing the first successful vaccine against epidemic typhus. Rudolf Weigl received nominations for the Nobel Prize in Medicine every year between 1930 and 1934, as well as from 1936 to 1939.
Education and early age
Rudolf Weigl was born as Rudolf Stefan Jan Weigl on September 2, 1883, in Prerau, Austria-Hungary. His father died in a bicycle accident when he was a small child. Elisabeth Kroesel, his mother, married Józef Trojnar, a high school teacher from Poland. Weigl grew up in Jaso of Poland. Despite being a native German speaker, he embraced the Polish language and culture once the family immigrated to Poland.
Later the family moved to Lviv. In 1907, Weigl received his degree from the Lwów University biology department there after studying under Professors Benedykt Dybowski (1833-1930) and J. Nusbaum-Hilarowicz (1859-1917). Weigl worked as Nusbaum’s assistant after graduation and in 1913 he completed his habilitation, effectively giving him tenure. He subsequently earned doctorates in histology, comparative anatomy, and zoology.
Career and professional life
Weigl began to investigate the origins of typhus after being drafted as a doctor into the Austro-Hungarian army after the start of World War I in 1914. Weigl headed the Laboratory for the Study of Spotted Typhus at a military hospital in Przemyl from 1918 to 1920. He was elected to the military sanitary council of the Polish Army in 1919. He created a vaccine when he began to conduct research and experiments.
Weigl continued to study and work at a facility in Lwów after Germany conquered Poland in 1939. There he was able to increase production of his typhus vaccine. Rudolf worked on creating a spotted fever vaccine for the next four years in Lwów. He supervised and directed the Lwów-based Institute for Typhus and Virus Research. Weigl developed a spotted fever vaccine that significantly reduced symptoms but did not fully protect against the disease.
Legend: Rudolf Weigl was captured during his experiment in the laboratory Source: The Sun
Further…
Weigl’s research came to the attention of the Nazis when they occupied Poland in World War II. He was instructed to establish a typhus vaccine manufacturing plant at the Institute when they conquered Lwów. For the installation, Weigl hired several of his Jewish friends and co-workers. Weigl hired and protected some 2,000 Polish, Jewish and underground intellectuals. He employed many of these people to help him with his research on typhus and his experiments on lice.
Many of his Jewish friends mainly helped grow the lice in exchange for food, security, and doses of the vaccine once it was ready. Her vaccines were hidden in the Lwów and Warsaw ghettos, as well as in other concentration camps and even in certain Gestapo cells. Weigl was credited with saving nearly 5,000 lives while the Nazis were in power.
Rudolf Weigl – Vaccine development
Weigl developed a method of creating a typhus vaccine by culturing infected lice and grinding them into a vaccine paste in 1930. He followed Charles Nicolle’s discovery in 1909 that lice were the vector of epidemic typhus and work done in a vaccine for the closely related Rocky Mountain typhus. spotted fever. He discovered that stomach lice infected with Rickettsia prowazeki, the organism that causes typhus in humans, could be used to create a vaccine.
In 1918, he began work on the first iteration of the vaccine and began testing it in rats and even healthy human volunteers. Over the years, he improved on this method and, in 1933, he carried out extensive research to produce bacteria and experiment on lice using a microinfection strategy. The process included four main steps:
- Healthy and growing lice for about 12 days.
- Giving them injections against typhus.
- Continuous growth of lice for an additional 5 days.
- Remove the midgut of the lice and make a paste out of them (this is how the vaccine was).
Further…
The more humane the blood, the better for lice growth. His technique was initially tested on guinea pigs. But in 1933 he began to carry out extensive experiments on people, giving lice human blood by allowing them to suck on human legs through a screen. In the last stage, when the lice have become infected, this can lead to typhus. He solved this problem by giving humans “shot” vaccines, which effectively prevented them from dying (although some contracted the disease). Some of the earliest lice feeders included Weigl and his wife Zofia Weigl. He contracted the disease but recovered.
Belgian missionaries who worked in China between 1936 and 1943 made the first significant use of their vaccination. Vaccines were soon administered throughout Africa as well. The vaccine was difficult to manufacture on a large scale and dangerous to prepare. Other vaccines were created that were less harmful and more expensive to produce over time, such as the Cox vaccine made from egg yolk.
achievements
In the years 1930-1934 and 1936-1939, Weigl regularly received Nobel Prize nominations. Despite these nominations, he never received a Nobel Prize for his contributions to vaccine research or social work.
Weigl’s study, effort and dedication were appreciated by many people even 50 years after his death. He received the Righteous Among the Nations distinction in 2003. His efforts to save several Jewish lives during World War II were recognized with this honor by Israel. Google released a Google Doodle honoring Weigl on September 2, 2021, his 138th birthday.
Personal life
Weigl moved to Kraków, in southern Poland, after the border adjustments of the war. At the Jagiellonian University, he was appointed president of the General Institute of Microbiology. Later, at the University of Pozna, he was appointed professor of biology at the department of medicine. Although he retired in 1951, his vaccination continued for several more years.
Besides, he was a married man. He had married Zofia Weigl in 1921. However, there is no exact information about his wedding and married life.
At the age of 73, Weigl passed away in the Polish mountain resort of Zakopane on August 11, 1957. He was buried in Krakow’s revered Rakowicki Cemetery. The typhus research department of the University of Lwów established the Weigl Institute for its study and work on typhus. The third part of the night, a 1971 film by Andrzej Uawski, gives the institute a lot of screen time.
Rudolf Weigl – Net Worth 2023
Rudolf was one of the hardworking and successful Polish biologists. He had made a fair amount of money throughout his career. He had a net worth of $1 million at the time of his death.
Social Networks and Body Measurements
Rudolf was not active on any social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. He did not use these social media platforms throughout his life.
Similarly, details about his height, weight, clothing size, shoe size, etc., are also not available. However, looking at the photos of her we can assume that she had a pair of black eyes with black hair. He was a bearded man.
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Categories: Biography
Source: vcmp.edu.vn