Pizzas galore!

While there he supervised thousands of blood transfusions. Observing frequent adverse transfusion reactions, he developed an interest in them that led him to his later research.

In 1944 Dausset was sent to London during the bombardment by V1 flying bombs. On June 16, 1944, ten days after D-Day, he landed at Arromanches, Normandy, with the Free French Forces, in charge of a convoy of medical supplies. In 1945, after participating in the liberation of Paris, he left the military as a second lieutenant.

He then returned to the University of Paris, receiving his medical degree in 1945. He did his internship in haematology and paediatrics at hospitals in Paris.

Between 1946 and 1948 he was laboratory director at the French National Blood Transfusion Centre at Hôpital Saint-Antoine. In 1948 he was sent to the US, as a trainee, to the Children’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. He worked in one of the laboratories of the Harvard Medical School laboratories.

In 1949 he returned to France to work again at the blood transfusion centre, where he immediately became interested in the new immunohaematology techniques (which investigate antigen-antibody reactions) for red blood cells. He became the head of the immunohaematology laboratory at the National Blood Transfusion Centre.

In 1958 he was appointed an assistant professor of haematology at the Faculty of Medicine in Paris. In 1963 he was promoted to professor of haematology and appointed head of the Immunology Department at Hôpital Saint-Louis. In 1977 the Collège de France appointed him Professor of Experimental Medicine.

In 1984 he established the Human Polymorphism Study Centre (CEPH), a genetic research laboratory, in Paris which, in 1993, became the Foundation Jean Dausset-CEPH.

He was also the chairman of the France bone marrow grafts register (France Greffe de Moelle), an institute that searches for donors of bone marrow worldwide to find a donor who is compatible with a patient needing a transplant.

Dausset was a prolific author, writing more than 400 scientific papers, a number of books and many chapters in scientific books.

He received many honours. He was a member of the science academies of seven countries and was awarded honorary professorships by the universities of Brussels (1977), Geneva (1977) and Liège (1980). In 1978 he won the Wolf Prize in Medicine of Israel.

The value of Dausset’s work was enormous; it benefited thousands of patients. He was known as a humanist and a champion of human rights. He was active in the Universal Movement for Responsibility in Science, founded in 1974, and the creation of the International Bioethics Committee for the use of the advances of modern medicine, particularly for the Human Genome Project. His ethical and moral standards were exemplary.

In addition to his scientific work, he was enthusiastic about art, collecting works by Surrealist artists and exhibiting them in a gallery that he ran in Paris.

His wife, Rosita, a son and a daughter survive him.

Professor Jean Dausset, immunologist and Nobel prizewinner, was born on October 19, 1916. He died on June 6, 2009, aged 92