Ten Nobels for the future

Jean Dausset, born in Toulouse in 1916, studied at the Lycée Michelet and the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Paris. He enrolled in the Free French forces in 1939 and participated in the Tunisian campaign performing blood transfusions and other emergency medical aid. It was his initiation into immunohematology.

After the war he devoted himself completely to research. Jean Bernard and Marcel Bessis had just developed a transfusion system for the complete replacement of blood for infants. Dausset adapted the system for adults and obtained successful results with many cases of leukaemia and kidney failure caused by induced abortions. In 1948 he spent a year in a Harvard Medical School hematology laboratory at the Children's Hospital in Boston. In 1952 he described the principle of agglutination and thrombo-agglutination; in 1958 the first leukocyte histocompatibility complex.

Concerned about the state of medical research in France, Dausset, with Robert Debré, began a far-reaching reform of university hospital structures. His three years as a consultant for the Ministry of Education led to a law that established full-time hours in hospitals and introduced professors of the fundamental sciences, giving them responsibilities in the new university-hospital centres. Appointed Hospital Biologist and Professor of Immunohematology, Dausset, with Jean Bernard, founded the Institute for Research on Blood Disease at the Saint Louis Hospital, where he established the correlation between the survival of tissue grafts and the incompatibility of leukocyte groups. He then defined the major istocompatibility complex, now knowned as HLA, thus determining the laws of human transplants. He founded France-Transplant and subsequently France-Greffe de Moelle to further the practical application of his discoveries.

In 1977 he was named Professor of Experimental Medicine at the Collège de France, a post once held by Claude Bernard. In 1980 he received the Nobel Prize for Medicine and in 1982 became President of the Mouvement Universel de la Responsabilité Scientifique. He was also a member of the French Ethics Commission for eight years. His range of interests broadened to include human polymorphisms not only of HLA, but of the all human genome. In 1984 he created the Centre d'Etude du Polymorphisme Humain (CEPH), making available to the international scientific community the invaluable material gathered during the course of his genetic studies.

See also: http://www.cephb.fr/

1996
Ethics
of predictive medicine