Discovery of the Human Leukocyte Antigen System

The discovery of the human leucocyte antigen system was the work, carried out in Paris in the 1950s and 1960s, that identified the cell-surface molecules which let the immune system tell its own tissue from foreign tissue and which govern whether a transplant is accepted. Jean Dausset identified an antibody specific to white blood cells in 1958, and in the following years, working with Felix Rapaport and other collaborators, he used skin graft experiments on volunteers to show that graft success depended on histocompatibility. By the end of 1967 family studies had shown that the leucocyte antigens belonged to a single system, which he first called Hu-1 and which was renamed HLA in 1968. In humans the system turned out to work in a way similar to the mouse system George Snell had described, and Dausset shared the 1980 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Snell and Baruj Benacerraf for this line of work.