Jean Dausset

Jean-Baptiste-Gabriel-Joachim Dausset (19 October 1916 – 6 June 2009) was a French immunologist born in Toulouse, France. Dausset received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1980 along with Baruj Benacerraf and George Davis Snell for their 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, Dausset founded the Human Polymorphism Study Center (CEPH) in 1984, which was later renamed the Foundation Jean Dausset-CEPH in his honour. He married Rose Mayoral in 1963, with whom he had two children, Henri and Irène. Jean Dausset died on June 6, 2009, in Majorca, Spain, at the age of 92.

Jean-Baptiste-Gabriel-Joachim Dausset was born on 19 October 1916, in Toulouse, France. He was the youngest of four children of Henri Dausset and Elisabeth Dausset (born Renard). His father was from the Pyrénées, and was a doctor by profession, and his mother was a housewife from Lorraine. Following the end of World War I the Dausset family moved to Biarritz where Jean spent most of his childhood. His father was head doctor at the Bayonne Hospital, a position that would make a great impression on Jean. Dausset was home schooled by his mother, as well as by a tutor, who would periodically come to the house. At the age of 11, Dausset and his family moved to Paris. He began his formal schooling at the Lycée Michelet, at age 15. After earning his Baccalauréat in mathematics, Dausset was convinced by his father to study medicine at the University of Paris. Both of Dausset's parents died just after he became an extern at the Paris Hospitals, at the age of 19. Dausset failed to pass an internship entrance exam at the Paris Hospitals, and was preparing for a second attempt when World War II broke out.

Dausset was enlisted in the French army, and sent off to Northern Italy for a year. Upon his return to Paris in 1940, Dausset studied ardently and passed his medical internship exam. Soon after passing his exams, Dausset joined the Free French Forces in North Africa as an ambulance worker. He was originally stationed in Morocco, but was later sent to the more active Tunisia. Dausset got his first taste of hematology when he had to perform numerous blood transfusions on wounded soldiers. As the war was winding down in 1944, Dausset returned to Paris where he worked in the Regional Blood Transfusion Center at the Saint-Antoine Hospital.

After the war, Dausset worked as an intern at the Paris Hospitals, which were in a state of disrepair and badly needed structural reform. Dausset formed a group of radical doctors who pushed for change in the French medical system. Due to his activist role in this group, Dausset was appointed as the Advisor to the Cabinet of the National Ministry of Education. The physician Robert Debré worked with Dausset, and pushed the government into forming a committee for the reform of medical education. Hospitals were joined with universities for the first time in France, and doctors were required to instruct classes to medical students. With the newly introduced system of university research hospitals, research began within the hospitals themselves, as opposed to in the universities alone, and full-time work for doctors was established (Debré reform of 11 and 30 December 1958).

After World War II Dausset worked with Professor Marcel Bessis who had developed a new transfusion technique called exchange transfusion. He worked as an immunohematologist and was interested in anaemic patients who required blood transfusions, he found that these patients lacked both red and white blood cells. In 1948, Dausset went to work as an intern in the Children's Hospital in Boston. He worked there in a hematology lab for about four years.

He returned to France in 1952 and once again took up the position of an intern with Marcel Bessis. It was during this time that Dausset conducted his first official research. With Bessis, Dausset discovered the first antigen-presenting leucocyte, but it was only officially described in 1958. Between the years 1952 and 1957 he collaborated with many researchers such as Gilbert Malinvaud and Jacques and Monique Colombani. From 1952 to 1957, majority of Dausset's time went into developing techniques and developing further ways of confirming the presence of certain antibodies. He was made the head of research at Professor Georges Marchal’s immunohematology laboratory in the Broussais Hospital. During this time, Dausset performed blood transfusions between a voluntary donor and patients in order to further his research in the field of immune responses in the body. He was testing the ability of the antigen-presenting leucocytes in the recipient’s body, which came originally from the donor’s blood. In 1958, Dausset discovered an antibody called MAC which was a leuco-agglutinate; the abbreviation MAC actually stands for the initials of the names of the donors whose blood Dausset and his colleagues had used during the research. From 1960 to 1965 Dausset worked primarily on improving organ transplantation techniques and the mechanisms involved in enhancing the body’s ability to accept the new tissue. To do this, Dausset again used the blood of voluntary donors and patients to see what differences lay in the blood of the two individuals and how to minimize these differences. 1965 was a crucial year for research. There was an intense competition amongst the researchers of the immunohematology field as everyone was on the brink of making a major discovery in the genetic and transplantation research. During this time, Dausset worked with Paul Ivany in Prague and they used leuco-agglutination and lymphocyte toxicity techniques to make some very significant discoveries. They discovered the Hu-1 antigen and the H-2 antigen.

In 1963 Jean Dausset became the head of the immunology at the Hôpital Saint-Louis in 1963. This is when he discovered the HLA system, with Felix Rapaport; by performing skin transplant experiments on volunteers and showed that success depended on histocompatibility. Dausset was the assistant director of the Research Institute in Blood diseases until 1968, he then became the director of the "Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale"(INSERM) transplantation immunogenetics research unit. Dausset founded France Transplant and France Greffe de Moelle, which brings matching donor organs to recipients and provides bone marrow for transplant respectively.

Dausset began his research shortly after obtaining his medical degree in 1945, while working as an intern in the hematology lab at the Children’s Hospital in Boston. His first paper was published in 1950, and dealt with the detection of incomplete antibodies using trypsinized erythrocytes in a plasmatic medium, a technique that displayed improved sensitivity over other techniques used at the time. He went on to publish more works in the field of hematology, including developing a technique in 1952 for the removal of plasma from red blood cells to be used in transfusions to patients somehow intolerant of whole blood transfusions. In 1952 he returned to France and continued his research, particularly focusing on hemolytic anemia, and publishing several works dealing with various forms of blood cell agglutination. It was during this period of research, in 1954, when Dausset first observed an anti-leucocyte agglutinating substance, though it was not until 1958 that he identified an isoantibody specific to leucocytes, and published his findings. It was this finding and the extensive cascade of work that followed that would ultimately earn Dausset his Nobel Prize.