Editor's note: Citation Classics Commentaries were written by the authors of some of studies that were the most highly cited papers between 1961 and 1975. The essays were originally published between 1977 and 1993 in Current Contents, a publication of the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), now Thomson Scientific. (ISI was founded by Eugene Garfield, also the founder of The Scientist.)
In this essay, Jean Dausset recalls experiments in which he mixed blood derivatives from different patients and observed clumping of white blood cells. Dausset correctly hypothesized that certain human leukocyte antigens (HLAs) stimulated this immune response. He called the first group Mac, which has since become known as HLA-A2. Further work showed that these antigens formed part of the human major histocompatibility complex, a key component of the immune system. Dausset received the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1980, and four years later he used ...
