Introduction

Abstract

The discovery of the blood groups in humans is one of the most important achievements of modern biology. At the beginning of this century, Karl Landsteiner described the ABO system (Landsteiner 1901), the knowledge of which enabled blood transfusion to become current practice, thus opening the way to the use of modern surgical methods. Ten years later, the presence of a red cell antigen similar to that found in humans was, for the first time, confirmed in a nonhuman species, namely in the chimpanzee (von Dungern and Hirszfeld 1913). This work points to the very early interest in the comparative serology of blood groups in an attempt to trace their evolutionary pathways. The systematic study of the homologues of human ABO groups in primate animals was undertaken by Karl Landsteiner and his pupil Philip Miller and reported in a series of articles published in 1925 (Landsteiner and Miller 1925a-c). The discovery of another major human blood group system, the M-N system, by Landsteiner and Levine (1927a,b) prompted investigations on the distribution of these newly defined antigens in the blood of nonhuman primates. It was again Landsteiner, this time jointly with Alexander Wiener, who carried out extensive experiments with ape and monkey blood using rabbit anti-human anti-M and anti-N reagents.