George Davis Snell

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George Davis Snell (December 19, 1903 – June 6, 1996) was a U.S. geneticist and co-recipient of the 1980 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, together with Baruj Benacerraf and Jean Dausset, for discovery of the Major histocompatibility complex genes which encode cell surface molecules important for the immune system's distinction between self and non-self.

Snell was born in Bradford, Massachusetts in December of 1903; he was the youngest of three. He earned his bachelor's degree from Dartmouth College in 1926. At Dartmouth, continued his passion for mathematics and science, focusing on genetics. At the advice of John Gerould, his first genetics professor and mentor, he enrolled at Harvard University, earning his PhD in 1930. At Harvard, he worked with Herman Muller, working on gene linkage in mice. In 1935 Snell arrived at The Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor. Snell received a Sc.D. from Bates College in 1982.

Snell's father worked as a secretary for the local YMCA. He invented a device for winding induction coils for motorboat engines. In Bar Harbor, he met and married Rhoda Carson. Together they had three sons, Thomas, Roy, and Peter. In his leisure time, Snell enjoyed Skiing, a passion he developed during his years at Dartmouth, as well as tennis.

In 1988, he authored a substantial book, Search for a Rational Ethic, on the nature of ethics and the rules by which we live. It includes an evolution-based ethic founded on biological realities that he believed to be applicable to all human beings.

Snell died in Bar Harbor, Maine on June 6, 1996.

Reference

Les Prix Nobel. The Nobel Prizes 1980, Editor Wilhelm Odelberg, Nobel Foundation, Stockholm, 1981

 

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