Baruj BenacerrafNATIONAL LIBRARY OF MEDICINE
Baruj Benacerraf, the geneticist and immunologist who earned the 1980 Nobel Prize for his discovery of the gene that governs the immune system’s reaction to foreign bodies, died on August 2, 2011 of pneumonia, at the age of 90.
Benacerraf started his Nobel Prize winning work with a chance observation. He had immunized a group of guinea pigs with a synthetic antigen, expecting to see all of the animals develop an immune response. But only about 40 percent of the rodents reacted, suggesting that individual genetic differences controlled the response. He then grouped the animals into responders and non-responders, and through a series of cross-mating experiments, confirmed that the response was controlled by a single dominant gene.
Interestingly, Benacerraf himself became allergic to guinea pigs ...
