3 SHARE NOBEL FOR MEDICINE
Author: Associated Press
Date: Saturday, October 11, 1980
Page: ?????
Section: RUN OF PAPER
A Harvard professor, a scientist in Bar Harbor, Maine, and a Frenchman shared
the 1980 Nobel Prize in medicine for their separate work in genetics.
The three won for their discoveries on how genetic makeup determines
whether a person successfully combats cancer and other diseases.
The award went to genetic researchers and immunologists Baruj Benacerraf,
a Venezuelan-born American citizen working at Harvard University; George
Snell, of the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, and Frenchman Jean
Dausset of the immunological laboratory of St. Louis Hospital of the
University of Paris.
The three share the coveted prize, this year carrying a sum of $211,000,
for their work on "genetically determined structures on the cell surface that
regulate immunological reactions."
Dausset, who will be 64 on Oct. 19, is from Toulouse and has worked at the
hospital since 1963. Interviewed by telephone in his Paris apartment, Dausset
said the two Americans with whom he shared the prize were "excellent friends
and, even though we didn't work together, we have been exchanging the results
of our experiments for a long time."
He said he had visited the others laboratories in the United States and
they had visited his institution.
Of the four Nobel recipients named so far this year, three are Americans.
The United States has dominated the Nobel annals, particularly in science
categories and more strongly than ever in the last five years. After a clean
sweep of the science awards as well as the literature prize in 1976, more than
half the laureates have been American citizens.
The three newly chosen researchers have explored the genetic regulation of
the body's immune response. They showed that so called H antigens
(histocompatibility antigens) determine the interaction of the multitude of
different cells responsible for the body's immunological reactions - including
the combat of infections and rejection of foreign matter.
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