Ludwik Fleck was born in
Lemberg (
Lwów in Polish, now
L'viv,
Ukraine) into a Jewish family and grew up in the cultural autonomy of the Austrian province of
Galicia. He graduated from a Polish
lyceum (secondary school) in 1914 and enrolled at
Lwów's
Jan Kazimierz University, where he received his medical degree. In 1920 he became an assistant to the famous typhus specialist
Rudolf Weigl at
Jan Kazimierz University. From 1923 to 1935 Fleck worked in the department of internal medicine at Lwów General Hospital, then became director of the bacteriological laboratory at the local social security authority. From 1935 he worked at the private bacteriological laboratory which he had earlier founded. With
Nazi Germany's occupation of
Lwów, Fleck was sent with his wife, Ernestina Waldmann, and son Ryszard to
the city's Jewish ghetto. He continued his research in the hospital and developed a new procedure in which he procured a
vaccine from the
urine of
typhus patients. Fleck's work was known to the German occupiers, and his family were arrested in December 1942 and sent to the Laokoon pharmaceutical factory to produce a typhus
serum. He and his family were arrested again and sent to the
Auschwitz concentration camp on 7 February 1943. His task was to diagnose
syphilis, typhus, and other illnesses using serological tests. From December 1943 until the liberation of Poland on 11 April 1945, Fleck was detained in
Buchenwald concentration camp; there he worked with
Marian Ciepielowski to produce a working typhus vaccine for camp inmates, while producing a fake vaccine for the
SS. Between 1945 and 1952, in
Lublin, he served as head of the Institute of Microbiology at the
Maria Curie-Skłodowska University School of Medicine. In 1952 he moved to
Warsaw to become director of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the Mother and Child State Institute. In 1954 he was elected a member of the
Polish Academy of Sciences. Fleck's research during these years focused on the behavior of leucocytes in infectious and stress situations. Between 1946 and 1957 he published 87 medical and scientific articles in Polish, French, English, and Swiss journals. In 1951 he was awarded the National Prize for Scientific Achievements, and in 1955 the Officer's Cross of the
Order of Polonia Restituta. In 1956, after a heart attack and the discovery that he was suffering from
lymphosarcoma, Fleck emigrated to Israel, where a position was created for him at the
Israel Institute for Biological Research. He died in 1961, aged 64, of a second heart attack. The
Ludwik Fleck Prize is awarded annually for the best book in the field of
science and technology studies. The prize was created in 1992 by the 4S Council (
Society for the Social Studies of Science). == Thought collective ==