Jean Dausset

Jean Dausset was a French immunologist, born in Toulouse in 1916 and died in 2009, who shared the 1980 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Baruj Benacerraf and George Snell for discoveries about the genetically determined structures on cell surfaces that regulate immune reactions. He trained in medicine in Paris, served with the Free French Forces as an ambulance worker during the Second World War and then worked in blood transfusion and immunohematology. In 1958 he identified an antibody specific to white blood cells, and through skin graft experiments in the 1960s he helped show that graft success depended on tissue compatibility governed by what became known as the human leucocyte antigen system. He later founded France Transplant and the Human Polymorphism Study Center, now the Foundation Jean Dausset-CEPH.