August 10, 1900–October 18, 1987

BY ELOISE R. GIBLETT

PHILIP LEVINE'S life spanned a remarkable period of discovery and early development of blood group genetics and immunology that began with Karl Landsteiner's detection of the ABO blood group system in 1901 and ended during the 1980s with the retirement or death of nearly all of its major contributors. Long before the biochemical basis for inheritance was known, these pioneers made farreaching deductions from simple serological observations, confirming in human subjects the basic laws of inheritance and such phenomena as gene mutation, linkage, balanced polymorphism, and population differentiation. Similarly, although immunogenetics was in its infancy, they advanced many immunological principles and discovered the basis for certain diseases—notably hemolytic disease of the newborn. It was this discovery for which Philip Levine will best be remembered.

The sixth of seven children, Levine was born in Kletsk, Russia, in the summer of 1900; his family came to the United States in 1908. Many years later Levine said he still had vivid memories of the antisemitism to which his people were subjected. One has only to read the descriptions by other Jewish immigrants of life in Russia at the turn of the