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The Mystery of Human Blood Types
The ABO blood group was discovered in the first decade of the 1900s by Austrian physician Karl Landsteiner. Through a series of experiments, Landsteiner classified blood into the four well-known types. The “type” actually refers to the presence of a particular type of antigen sticking up from the surface of a red blood cell. An antigen is anything that elicits a response from an immune cell called an antibody. Antibodies latch onto foreign substances that enter the body, such as bacteria and viruses, and clump them together for removal by other parts of the immune system. The human body naturally makes antibodies that will attack certain types of red-blood-cell antigens. For example, people with type A blood have A antigens on their red blood cells and make antibodies that attack B antigens; people with type B blood have B antigens on their red blood cells and make antibodies that attack A antigens. So, type A people can’t donate their blood to type B people and vice versa. People who are type AB have both A and B antigens on their red blood cells and therefore don’t make any A or B antibodies while people who are type O have no A or B antigens and make both A and B antibodies. (This is hard to keep track of, so I hope the chart below helps!)
After Landsteiner determined the pattern of the ABO blood group, he realized blood types are inherited, and blood typing became one of the first ways to test paternity. Later, researchers learned ABO blood types are governed by a single gene that comes in three varieties: A, B and O. (People who are type AB inherit an A gene from one parent and a B gene from the other.
More than a hundred years after Landsteiner’s Nobel Prize-winning work, scientists still have no idea what function these blood antigens serve....
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