Human Blood Groups and Natural Selection
This extract was created in the absence of an abstract.
Excerpt
The distinctions between human beings made by their ABO blood groups, discovered by Land-steiner in 1900, were at first regarded as individual peculiarities. It is difficult for us at the present time to sense the attitude of biologists of that period towards heredity, but we know that it was clear almost from the first that the blood groups were inborn, and it must have been realized that, in some sense, they were inherited.
With the rediscovery of Mendelism at about this time, it must have occurred to many persons that they were gene-controlled, but the first published suggestion that this might be the case seems to have come in 1908 from Epstein and Ottenberg. Two years later the blood groups were clearly shown by Von Dungern and Hirszfeld (1910a, 1910b) to be inherited. These authors, however, thought that the presence or absence of each of the characters A and B...
