Baruj Benacerraf

Encyclopedia : B : BA : BAR : Baruj Benacerraf

Baruj Benacerraf, M.D.

Baruj Benacerraf (born 29 October, 1920) is a Venezuelan-American immunologist who shared the 1980 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the "discovery of the Major histocompatibility complex genes which encode cell surface molecules important for the immune system's distinction between self and non-self". His brother is well-known philosopher Paul Benacerraf.

Born in Caracas, his parents were Sephardic Jews from Morocco. Dr. Benacerraf moved to Paris from Venezuela with his family in 1925. In 1940 he emigrated to the USA and in 1943, he became a naturalized citizen. He went to college at Columbia University School of General Studies. He then went on to attain the degree of Doctor of Medicine from the Medical College of Virginia, the only school to which he was accepted. After his medical internship and US Army service (1945–8), he joined Columbia University (1948–50). He performed research in Paris (1950–6), relocated to New York University (1956–68), moved to the National Institutes of Health (1968–70), then joined Harvard (1970–91), concurrently serving the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston (1980). He began studies of allergies in 1948, and discovered the Ir (immune response) genes that govern transplant rejection (1960s).

External links

• [1980 Nobel Medicine Winners]
• [Nobel autobiography]

From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.