Born in Berlin, Germany, Blatteis and his Jewish family were forced to flee their home to escape further Nazi persecution after his father's arrest in the aftermath of the
Kristallnacht and as a condition for his release from
Buchenwald concentration camp where he was a prisoner. They were among the 937 Jewish German refugees aboard the
MS St. Louis who were denied entry into Cuba, the United States, Canada, and all the other Western Hemisphere countries, and consequently obliged to return to Europe. Blatteis later recalled that his introduction by Horvath to his later field of research was "trying to maintain my own body temperature as a test subject in the cold room". Immediately following his graduation, he was drafted into the U.S. Army and assigned as a first lieutenant, Medical Service Corps, to the
United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Knox, Kentucky, where he served until 1961. While there, he conducted experiments on dogs to determine the cause of
shivering, reporting that it related to circulation of cooled blood rather than a nervous response. In 1966, Blatteis was appointed to the faculty of the Department of Physiology,
University of Tennessee College of Medicine, as an associate professor, becoming a full professor in 1974. The following year he was named a
Fulbright scholar for a program at the
Cayetano Heredia University of
Peru from June to September 1975. ==Professorial career==