About a vaccine from Lviv

The building at Zielona Street in Lviv, erected just before the outbreak of World War II according to the design of Jan Bagieński, became the seat of the Social Insurance Institution and medical institutions. Today there is a Lviv sanepid and the Faculty of Microbiology at the Medical University.

During the Nazi occupation, the modern rooms were converted into a research institute headed by Rudolf Weigl, a professor at the University of Lviv. He created a center of research on typhus in Lviv with wide publicity, a meeting place for the most eminent scientists in the interwar period. At that time, a world-renowned biologist discovered a vaccine for one of the deadliest diseases ever.

During the war, the Weigel Institute on Zielona Street became a place where the lives of Lviv people were saved, hiring them to feed lice used in the study. The Institute's collaborators, including so-called lice feeders, received documents and food allowance to protect them. In this way, the professor helped about four thousand people. He saved, among others Stefan Banach and Zbigniew Herbert. The typhus vaccine produced at his Institute was illegally transferred to civilians fighting underground, and was also sent to the Lviv and Warsaw ghettos.

A great biologist and a man who saved thousands of people, although he was nominated for the Nobel Prize three times, he never received it. He was buried at the Rakowicki Cemetery in Krakow.



 
   


The building at Zielona Street in Lviv, the seat of the Social Insurance Institution and medical institutions.



Rudolf Weigl - zoologist and bacteriologist, professor at the University of Lviv, member of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences in the laboratory while working. 1930s.



Jan Kazimierz University in Lviv. Institute of prof. Rudolf Weigel. Labs feeding the infected lice in the study of the spotty dura. 1930.



Weigel Institute at Zielona Street, 1943. Feeders of lice.


The building described was presented at the one of the exhibits Lviv, 24th June 1937.City, architecture, modernism (ICC Gallery, 2018), presenting models of major Lviv modernist buildings.