Benacerraf, Baruj

Benacerraf, Baruj bä´ro͞okh bĕnăs´ərəf [key], 1920–2011, American immunologist, b. Caracas, Venezuela, grad. Columbia (B.S., 1942), Medical College of Virginia (M.D., 1945). Raised in Paris, his Sephardic Jewish family fled the Nazis and came to the United States at the outset of World War II he became a U.S. citizen in 1943. He worked (1950–56) as a researcher in Paris before becoming a professor at New York Univ. (1956–66). Head of the pathology department at Harvard Medical School from 1969, he later became president of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (1980–91). His research in the early 1960s led to the discovery of genes that regulate immunological responses, for which he shared (with George Snell and Jean Dausset ) the 1980 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

See his autobiography (1998).

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