George Davis Snell

George Davis Snell was an American mouse geneticist and basic transplant immunologist, born in Bradford, Massachusetts, on December 19, 1903, the youngest of three children. He was educated in the Brookline schools and then at Dartmouth College, where he focused on genetics and received his bachelor degree in 1926, and he did graduate work at Harvard University with William E. Castle. After receiving his PhD he taught at Brown University from 1930 to 1931 and from 1935 worked as a staff scientist at the Jackson Laboratory. His work in mice led to the discovery of the genetic factors that determine the possibilities of transplanting tissue from one individual to another, and he introduced the concept of H antigens. This led to the discovery of the major histocompatibility complex in humans, a prerequisite for successful tissue and organ transplantation. He shared the 1980 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Baruj Benacerraf and Jean Dausset and died on June 6, 1996.