Post by Adam Sussman

During the Nazi occupation of Poland in World War II, Austro-Hungarian zoologist Rudolf Weigl was ordered to mass produce the typhus vaccine that he had invented before the war by setting up a production plant at his Institute. Typhus epidemics were killing those confined to POW camps, ghettos, and Nazi concentration camps due to unhygienic conditions. Weigl saw the order as an opportunity—not only was his vaccine circulated through ghettos, concentration camps, and Gestapo prisons, but Weigl saved about 5000 Jews, Polish intellectuals, and members of the Polish underground by employing them in his Institute to manufacture the vaccine. As a patent prosecutor, I owe my career and success to the inventors I work with on a daily basis. In each post in this series, I am profiling an inventor whose contribution(s) have influenced our world. Today, I am presenting Rudolf Weigl (1883 – 1957). #vaccine #typhus #inventor #technology #microbiology #history #righteousamongthenations #rescue