Jean Dausset

Jean Dausset, born in 1916, French immunologist who shared the 1980 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine with American geneticist George Davis Snell and Venezuelan-American immunologist Baruj Benacerraf for their discoveries of genetically determined cell-surface structures that regulate immunologic reactions.

Jean-Baptiste-Gabriel-Joachim Dausset was born in Toulouse on October 19, 1916. His medical studies at the University of Paris in the late 1930s were interrupted by the outbreak of World War II (1939-1945). During the war, he served the Free French Army in North Africa. He returned to Paris in 1945 and obtained his medical degree from the University of Paris. In 1946 Dausset was named head of the laboratories of the French National Blood Transfusion Center, where he remained until 1963. He took a leave of absence in 1948 to study hematology for two years at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1958 Dausset joined the faculty of the University of Paris as a professor of hematology. He became director of the research unit in immunogenetics of human transplantation at the French National Institute for Health and Medical Research, Paris, in 1968. In 1977 he was also appointed a professor of experimental medicine at the Collège de France, Paris. In 1984 he established the Human Polymorphism Study Center (CEPH), a genetic research laboratory, in Paris. It became the Foundation Jean Dausset-CEPH in 1993.

While serving in a blood-transfusion unit of the French Free Army during World War II, Dausset observed that some patients exhibited an adverse reaction to donor’s blood even when the donor’s blood matched the type of the recipient. In 1951 Dausset discovered that in these cases the donor’s blood had been affected by diphtheria and tetanus vaccinations that the donor had received: The vaccinations had boosted the blood’s antibodies to foreign material. He studied anemia and white blood cells (leukocytes) from 1952 to 1958. He discovered that humans have a center called the major histocompatability complex (MHC), which determines tissues and blood type affinity. When the body rejects a blood transfusion or a skin-graft it is because the MHC detects antigens that are unsuitable to the body. Dausset determined that the MHC of humans is made up of a small area of the sixth chromosome, that he called the human leukocyte antigen (HLA). The genetic basis of the human MHC became known in 1967, when Dausset carried out skin-graft experiments involving families and unrelated individuals. Dausset worked successfully to convince transplant surgeons worldwide of the need for tissue typing. He was also the first researcher to investigate the connection between MHC and specific diseases. Connections were later found between particular HLA antigens and arthritis, juvenile diabetes, multiple sclerosis, and autoimmune diseases. Dausset’s findings have made organ transplantation more successful than it was before tissue typing.