Professor Jean Dausset

Adrian Roberts · Jun 23, 2009

This French gentleman made a major contribution to Medicine, but also served in some very arduous situations as a surgeon with the Free French forces in WW2

Professor Jean Dausset - Telegraph

Professor Jean Dausset, who has died aged 92, was a Nobel Prize-winning immunologist whose pioneering work helped verify the compatibility of donor and recipient in organ and bone-marrow transplants; his work on genetics helped establish the field of "predictive medicine" which identifies the predisposition of individuals to certain diseases.

Dausset won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1980 (shared with George Snell and Baruj Benacerraf) for a lifetime's work, the crowning achievement of which was his contribution to the identification of the genetic system known as HLA, for Human Leukocyte Antigen.

Identifying the HLA system, by which human tissues belong to compatible and incompatible groups just as blood cells do, was a crucial step forward for transplants. Until Dausset's discovery, transplants were often marked by organ rejection and short life-expectancy for the patient. Identifying HLA had an effect well beyond the already substantial impact on transplants. It became clear that these were the key genes controlling immunity. Their effects are visible in susceptibility to so-called "autoimmune diseases" such as multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis and insulin-dependent diabetes, to infectious diseases such as HIV/Aids and to various cancers.

According to Dausset's colleague Laurent Degos, the nature of HLA also meant that it enabled the tracking of genetic heritage in groups of people and was therefore "a precise tool to understand migration and blood relations".

It was with this in mind, that, shortly before he retired to live permanently in Majorca in 2007, he claimed that one of the four realms to which he had made a significant contribution was "anthropology". The other three were: "Transplantation, predictive medicine and immune response".

Jean Baptiste Gabriel Joachim Dausset was born on October 19 1916 in Toulouse. His father was a captain in the French army, serving as a doctor, a career for which Jean was soon marked out. Jean was brought up in Biarritz, until the Daussets settled in Paris when he was 11. It was with a certain inevitability that he began medical studies, which he was completing at the outbreak of war in 1939.

He was called up to serve as a doctor in Rennes, then Autun, from which he retreated on his motorcycle as the Germans invaded in 1940. His unit fell back to the Alps, and, in the ensuing chaos, Dausset found himself back in Toulouse, from where he headed to North Africa. He made it to Algeria before the French defeat was completed, and he was demobilised.

Returning to Paris, he began his medical career. There he met a countess from the Caucasus who was recruiting volunteers to man ambulances in Morocco, a country which Dausset had already toured on his motorcycle before the outbreak of war.

Dausset began his irregular ambulance service in 1942, wearing flowing white silk robes in the Arab style, which were emblazoned with the countess's coat of arms. With the Allied landing in 1942, the ambulance unit joined regular forces, and headed to the thick of the fighting in Tunisia. Such was the rivalry between Free French generals Leclerc and Giraud, Dausset remembered, that a unit attached to one once loudly played music to drown out the speech of an officer attached to the other.

Dausset, who spent most of his career in research, found working on the front line "horrible".

"The ambulances arrived full of blood," he recalled later. "I saw my first casualties: Germans, Italians, Arabs. Bizarrely, some of the German wounded refused blood transfusions from Italians, but didn't mind it from Jews…"

In 1944, in the middle of the V-1 bombardment, Dausset got himself transferred to London, where he was issued a medical kit including a plastic bathtub, a small chair, and (contrary to wartime conventions) a machine gun.

He landed at Arromanches under incessant rain 10 days after D-Day, in charge of a convoy of medical supplies en route for Paris. With half his load destroyed, he finally arrived – only for his truck to give up the ghost on the Champs-Elysées, from where it was towed to its destination with a length of camouflage netting. Dausset then helped organise blood banks and transfusions for the Allied assault on Germany.

After the war, in tandem with Professor Marcel Bessis, he began his medical research in earnest, specialising in the properties of blood cells. "We were regarded as biologists more than doctors," he said. Their work helped improve the efficacy of transfusions, saving patients, including many women who had sought illegal abortions.

As part of the Marshall plan, Dausset went to Boston on a medical exchange programme in 1948, but did not enjoy his time there, blaming his shyness and poor English. Despite that, he had established good contacts with British medical researchers – in particular Robin Coombs at the British Society of Immunology. Dausset drew on Coombs's work to develop the idea that white blood cells could possess the same quality of "autoimmunity" displayed by red blood cells. By 1952 he had observed white blood cells clumping together in response to antibodies, a process known as leuco-agglutination.

This early research was carried out in antediluvian, dust-filled laboratories in Paris which, he recalled, "had been abandoned since 1914".

He was soon working towards HLA. "I understood, and little by little was able to prove, that cells of all tissues in an organism have a chemical identity which distinguishes them from cells of another organism of the same species to the point that they are incompatible one with another," he explained.

According to Danny Altmann, Professor of Immunology at the Department of Infectious Disease and Immunity, Imperial College, the period from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s was one of intense activity for immunologists and geneticists as they struggled to understand this enormously complex aspect of human genetics – HLA being the most variable family of genes in man. Along with Dausset, others in the field included Jon van Rood, Walter Bodmer, Rose Payne and Paul Terasaki.

"A key aspect of Dausset's contribution was his insight that one would only unravel the secrets of such a diverse group of genes by analysing large numbers of family 'pedigrees'," noted Altmann. The extension of this approach was to lead many years later to Dausset's founding of the Centre d'Etude du Polymorphisme Humain (CEPH), a major, international resource of family DNA samples. This resource became central to many disease genetics studies and contributed to efforts to analyse the human genome.

Dausset, was, however, not purely a pioneering research doctor. He was also a great organiser, contributing actively to the fundamental reorganisation of France's medical system in the late 1950s. For several years he was a government adviser, work which culminated in a law establishing full-time employment in French hospitals and encouraging research.

In 1958 he was named Assistant Professor of Haematology at the Faculty of Medicine in Paris, then Professor of Haematology in 1963, before being appointed Head of the Immunology Department at the Hôpital Saint-Louis. There he devoted himself entirely to research, uncovering the HLA system. He published the results in 1964.

Apart from the Nobel Prize, Jean Dausset was subsequently honoured with dozens of awards and honorary academic roles. Tall, thin and elegant, he was discreet but willing staunchly to defend his ideas.

Outside medicine, he was fond of the plastic arts, collecting examples of work by Surrealist artists and displaying them at a gallery he ran in Paris.

Jean Dausset, who died on June 6 in Palma, married, in 1963, Rose Mayoral, with whom he had a son and a daughter. Until the end of his life he was determined that his work in genetics should be used with a strong sense of moral purpose.

He feared what he called the "sorcerer's apprentices" in his profession, and noted that "the temptations of eugenics are close to the temptations of totalitarianism. Both can manipulate humans to create identical beings."
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Antipodean Andy · Jun 23, 2009

I think I understood only 3/4 of that. Am always in awe of medical types, particularly those involved in ground-breaking research. RIP.

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