Рудольф Вейгль: Спаситель от тифа и Праведник народов

Polish biologist, physician, and inventor (1883–1957)

Rudolf Stefan Jan Weigl (2 September 1883 – 11 August 1957) was a Polish biologist, physician and inventor, known for creating the first effective vaccine against epidemic typhus. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Medicine each year between 1930 and 1934, and from 1936 to 1939. Weigl worked during the Holocaust to save the lives of countless Jews by developing the vaccine for typhus and providing shelter to protect those suffering under the Nazi Germans in occupied Poland. For his contributions, he was named a Righteous Among the Nations in 2003.

Weigl was born in Prerau, which at the time was part of the Austro Hungarian Empire, to Austrian parents, of Austro Moravian descent. When he was a child, his father died in a bicycle accident. Later, the family moved to Lviv (Lwów in Polish, Lemberg in German and Yiddish), where in 1907 Weigl graduated from the biology department at the Lwów University, at which he had been a pupil of Professors Benedykt Dybowski (1833–1930) and J. Nusbaum–Hilarowicz (1859–1917). He then received his doctorate degrees in zoology, comparative anatomy, and histology. In 1919, he became a member of a military sanitary council in the Polish army. During the Nazi German occupation of Poland in World War II, Weigl's research attracted the attention of the Nazis. Many of these people he hired assisted him in his typhus research and experiments with lice. Many of his Jewish associates primarily helped grow the lice and in return, they received food, protection, and doses of the vaccine when it was fully developed. His vaccines were smuggled into ghettos in Lwów and Warsaw, various concentration camps, and even certain Gestapo prisons. It was estimated that Weigl was able to save around 5,000 lives during the Nazis' reign.

Following the border changes in the aftermath of the war, Weigl moved to Kraków in southern Poland. He was appointed chair of the General Microbiology Institute at the Jagiellonian University, and later chair of biology in the medical faculty at the University of Poznań. He retired in 1951, but production of his vaccine continued for several years. For Weigl's research and work with typhus at Lwów University, Weigl's Institute was created in the typhus research department. The institute features prominently in Andrzej Żuławski's 1971 film, The Third Part of the Night.

Weigl was continuously nominated for a Nobel Prize in the years 1930–1934 and 1936–1939. On 2 September 2021, Google commemorated Weigl’s 138th birthday with a Google Doodle.