History
The two most significant blood group systems were discovered by Karl Landsteiner during early experiments with blood transfusion: the ABO group in 1901 and in co-operation with Alexander S. Wiener the Rhesus group in 1937. Development of the Coombs test in 1945, the advent of transfusion medicine, and the understanding of ABO hemolytic disease of the newborn led to discovery of more blood groups, and now 30 human blood group systems are recognized by the International Society of Blood Transfusion (ISBT), and across the 30 blood groups, over 600 different blood group antigens have been found; many of these are very rare or are mainly found in certain ethnic groups. Blood types have been used in forensic science and were formerly used to demonstrate impossibility of paternity (e.g., a type AB man cannot be the father of a type O infant), but both of these uses are being replaced by genetic fingerprinting, which provides greater certainty.
Read more about this topic: Blood Type
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“It’s nice to be a part of history but people should get it right. I may not be perfect, but I’m bloody close.”
—John Lydon (formerly Johnny Rotten)
“... that there is no other way,
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“For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)