Baruj Benacerraf

Origins and early life

Baruj Benacerraf was born in Caracas, Venezuela, on 29 October 1920, of Spanish-Jewish ancestry, in his own words: his father, a textile merchant and importer, was born in Spanish Morocco, and his mother was born and raised in French Algeria. The family moved to Paris when he was five and stayed until 1939, so that he was schooled in French, then settled in New York in 1940 after a return to Venezuela. He graduated from Columbia University in 1942, was turned down by one medical school after another, which he put down to his ethnic and foreign background, and was finally admitted by the Medical College of Virginia in Richmond.

Work and career

He became an American citizen in 1943, married Annette Dreyfus, a fellow refugee from Paris, that same year, and after qualifying served as an army doctor in France. He began research in immunology in 1948 under Elvin Kabat at Columbia, worked from 1949 at the Broussais Hospital in Paris, and in 1956 moved to New York University when he could not set up a laboratory of his own in France. There, in the nineteen-sixties, he found that guinea pigs immunised with certain simple antigens split into responders and non-responders, and showed that the difference was governed by inherited immune response genes.

These genes lie in the major histocompatibility complex, and his work on them, pursued from 1968 at the National Institutes of Health and from 1970 at Harvard Medical School, shed light on the interplay within the immune system.

Recognition

The 1980 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded jointly to Benacerraf, Jean Dausset and George Snell “for their discoveries concerning genetically determined structures on the cell surface that regulate immunological reactions”. That year he became president of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, which he led until 1992, and he died at his home in Jamaica Plain, Boston, on 2 August 2011.