Jean Dausset

Jean-Baptiste-Gabriel-Joachim Dausset was a French immunologist, born in Toulouse on 19 October 1916 and raised partly in Biarritz and Paris. He studied medicine at the University of Paris, passed his medical internship exam after serving in the French army, and joined the Free French Forces in North Africa as an ambulance worker during the Second World War. He received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1980 along with Baruj Benacerraf and George Davis Snell for the discovery and characterisation of the genes making the major histocompatibility complex. Using the money from his Nobel Prize and a grant from the French Television he founded the Human Polymorphism Study Center (CEPH) in 1984, later renamed the Foundation Jean Dausset-CEPH. He was also a professor at the Collège de France and died in Mallorca on 6 June 2009 at the age of 92.