Jean Dausset

French immunologist

• Born: October 19, 1916; Toulouse, France
• Died: June 6, 2009; Palma, Majorca, Spain

Twentieth-century French immunologist Jean Dausset shared the 1980 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his research in genetics related to hematology. His investigations into human blood types and transfusions increased the accuracy of disease susceptibility diagnoses and reduced the rejection rate of transplant recipients.

Primary field: Biology

Specialties: Physiology; molecular biology; cellular biology; genetics

Early Life

Jean Baptiste Gabriel Joachim Dausset was the youngest of four children born to physician Henri Dausset and Elizabeth Brullard Dausset on October 19, 1916, in Toulouse, France. After World War I, Dausset’s family moved to Biarritz, France, where his father, a war veteran, worked as a physiotherapist, rheumatologist, and radiologist at nearby Bayonne Hospital.

Dausset was homeschooled until 1927, when his family relocated to Paris. He attended high school at Lycée Michelet in Vanves, a suburb of the capital, and graduated in 1935, around the time both his parents died. He afterward attended the University of Paris, majoring in mathematics, and earned a BS degree in 1939. Honoring his late father’s wishes, Dausset studied to become a hospital intern and embarked on a post-graduate curriculum that would lead to a medical degree at the university.

The outbreak of World War II interrupted Dausset’s studies. Inducted into the medical corps of the French army in 1939, he served in France before his unit was ordered to Algeria in North Africa. Following the French surrender in 1940, he returned to a German-occupied Paris to resume his education. In 1942, after giving up his identification documents so a Jewish colleague could escape the Nazis, Dausset volunteered to serve with an ambulance corps in Africa. He administered blood and plasma to wounded soldiers of all nationalities while serving near the front lines in Morocco and Tunisia. During this time, Dausset began experimenting with blood platelets to discover why some patients experienced bad reactions from transfusions. In 1944, he was transferred to London, England.

Soon after the Allied invasion of Normandy, on June 6, 1944 (D-Day), Dausset landed back in France and led a medical supply convoy to Paris. He was then put in charge of establishing blood banks at a regional transfusion center at Saint-Antoine Hospital in Paris. Dausset spent the last part of the war organizing numerous blood banks and transfusions for the Allied invasion of Germany.

Life’s Work

Once the war ended and Dausset was released from military service, he finished medical school at the University of Paris, earning his MD degree in 1945. As an intern at the Blood Transfusion Center of Saint-Antoine Hospital, he worked alongside doctor and professor Marcel Bessis, a fellow former army medic, practicing an exchange-transfusion technique learned on the battlefield. The goal of the transfusions was to save the lives of newborn infants and their mothers, often the victims of botched abortions. To improve transfusion success rates, Dausset and Bessis began conducting research into the specific properties of blood cells.

Dausset served from 1946 to 1948 as laboratory director at the transfusion center. In 1948, as a specialist in hematology and pediatrics, he was selected to participate in a medical scholar exchange program and was sent to the Children’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. During a four-year stay in the United States, Dausset worked with pediatrician and hematologist Louis K. Diamond and pediatric pathologist Sidney Farber. He also performed research in laboratories at Harvard Medical School, concentrating on autoimmunity, and studied leuco-agglutination, a white blood cell clumping phenomenon that occurs in the presence of antibodies.

Returning to France in 1952, Dausset resumed his duties at Saint-Antoine Hospital and continued his research into the immunity-producing genetics of blood cells. In 1958, he became an assistant professor of hematology at the University of Paris medical school. That same year, he observed and described the first human leukocyte antigen (HLA), one of the genetic proteins essential for determining immunities, disease susceptibilities, and transplant compatibilities within the major histocompatibility complex (MHC), which is found in molecules on the cell surfaces of all vertebrates.

In 1963, Dausset became a full professor of hematology at the university and was named head of the immunology department at Saint-Louis Hospital in Paris. He also married Rosita “Rose” Mayoral López of Madrid that year; they would later have two children, Henri and Irène. Immersing himself in research on the HLA system, Dausset worked with surgeon and professor Felix Rapaport in experimenting with tissue incompatibilities in volunteer blood donors, skin donors, and skin graft recipients. He published his findings in 1964.

In the late 1960s, Dausset and pediatrician Robert Debré together served as advisors to the National Ministry of Education to help reform medical studies at hospitals and universities throughout France. Their three-year effort resulted in the introduction of laws that established closer relationships between medical colleges and hospitals, provided for practicing doctors to teach medical students as full-time employees, and encouraged more on-site research at hospitals.

During the same decade, Dausset helped create the Research Institute in Blood Diseases at the Saint-Louis Hospital, and from 1968 he served as director of the institute’s research unit on human transplantation immunogenetics. In 1969, he founded France Transplant, an organization that coordinates organ transplants. He also founded the French Bone Marrow Grafts Registry, which maintains the records of millions of volunteers worldwide in order to find optimum matches between bone marrow donors and patient recipients.

Dausset left the University of Paris in 1977 to become the head of the Department of Experimental Medicine at the Collège de France in Paris. Three years later, he shared the 1980 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with American geneticist-immunologist George David Snell and Venezuelan-American immunologist Baruj Benacerraf, for their independent work in identifying the HLA genetic system. In 1984, Dausset used money from the Nobel award and funds from the French government to found the nonprofit Centre d’Etude du Polymorphisme Humain (Human Polymorphism Study Center), known as CEPH. The center was renamed the Fondation Jean Dausset-CEPH in 1993.

Until his retirement in 2003, Dausset continued to teach and conduct research. He then served as president of CEPH and chairman of the French Bone Marrow Grafts Registry. In 2007, he retired from public life and relocated to the Mediterranean island of Majorca, where he died on June 6, 2009, at the age of ninety-two.

Impact

During a career that spanned more than sixty years, Dausset dedicated his life to improving human health. His early examinations into the properties of blood, originally undertaken to eliminate adverse reactions to battlefield transfusions, evolved and expanded over time. Dausset’s extensive microscopic and clinical research significantly advanced scientific knowledge of the structure, character, and function of the immune response system. His findings also provided a greater understanding of the genetic influences that affect compatibility in transplantations. Lastly, Dausset’s susceptibility investigations led to breakthroughs in predictive medicine and provided new implications for anthropological studies of the historical effects of human disease.

Dausset was frequently recognized for his laboratory work. Among the many international honors he received prior to the 1980 Nobel Prize were two French Academy of Science prizes (1967 and 1969), the American Stratton Lecture and Landsteiner awards (1970), Canada’s Gairdner Foundation prize (1977), and prizes from Germany’s Koch Foundation and Israel’s Wolf Foundation (1978).

In addition to his research, Dausset’s public contributions have had a lasting impact. The reforms he made in the French medical community remain influential, and the organizations he founded for organ transplants and bone marrow matches still operate. The Fondation Jean Dausset CEPH, a DNA collection and distribution center, continues to investigate and collaborate with other facilities in several areas. The foundation’s primary functions are to map the human genome, to identify and clone inherited disorders, and to conduct research into such genetically susceptible ailments as polycystic kidney disease, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, neurofibromatosis, diabetes, Marfan syndrome, cystic fibrosis, and certain types of cancer.

Bibliography

Abbas, Abul K., Andrew H. Lichtman, and Shiv Pillai. Cellular and Molecular Immunology. 7th ed. Philadelphia: Saunders, 2011. Print. Covers established protocols and late-breaking experiments focusing on antigens, immune cells, and cytokines. Illustrations, links to online images, fact-based documents, appendices, glossary, index.

Badge, Peter. Nobel Faces:A Gallery of Nobel Prize Winners. Weinheim, Germany: Wiley-VCH, 2007. Print. A collection of biographies of all Nobel laureates alive at the time of publication, including Jean Dausset and co-Nobel recipient Baruj Benacerraf. Index.

Geha, Raif, and Luigi Notarangelo. Case Studies in Immunology: A Clinical Companion. 6th ed. Print. New York: Garland Science, 2011. Print. Highlights diagnoses and therapies for a range of problems typically encountered in immunology. Illustrations, index.

Lederer, Susan E. Flesh and Blood: Organ Transplantation and Blood Transfusion in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Oxford UP, 2008. Print. An overview of the history, science, and ethical considerations involved in transplantation. Index.

Murphy, Kenneth. Janeway’s Immunobiology. 8th ed. New York: Garland Science. 2011. Print. Covers all aspects of the study of human immunology, from the evolution of genetic immunity to clinical applications. Includes study questions, cross-references, and excerpts from Jean Dausset’s Nobel lecture. Illustrations, appendices, glossary, index.