Baruj Benacerraf

Baruj Benacerraf (born in Caracas, Venezuela, October 29, 1920) is a Venezuela-United States physicians. Benacerraf included in undergraduate studies at Columbia University, earning his degree in 1942. After Columbia, he entered the Medical College of Virginia in Richmond. A year later, he was hit in the U.S. Army draftee. During a year in 1945, became co-ass Benacerraf in Queens General Hospital, New York. In 1946, he was appointed First Lieutenant in the U.S. Army Medical Corps and was sent to Germany, he was discharged in 1947.


After World War II, he was awarded a scholarship at the Faculty of Medicine and Surgery at the Neurological Institute of Columbia University. From 1950 to 1956, Benacerraf moved with his family to Paris to take a position in Bernard Halpern's laboratory at Broussais Hospital. In 1956, he returned to the United States as an assistant professor of pathology at New York University School of Medicine. From 1961, Benacerraf continues to be a Professor of Pathology at the University of New York. In 1968, he moved to Bethesda, Maryland to get a position as Director at the Laboratory of Immunology Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases National. Finally in 1970, Benacerraf become Head of Pathology at Harvard Medical School.


He began studying allergy in 1948, and found the genes that instruct the immune response rejection cangkoq (1960). In 1972 he demonstrated the existence of lymphocytes T and B.
He received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1980 for "the discovery of major histocompatibility complex genes which encode cell surface molecules that are important for the differentiation of the immune system is active with the passive" along with George Snell and Jean-Baptiste-Gabriel-Joachim Dausset.


Honorary group

President of the American Association of Immunologists (1973)
President of the American Society for Experimental Biology and Medicine (1974)
President of the International Union of immunological Societies (1980)
American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1972)
National Academy of Science, U.S.A. (1973)
President Sidney Farber Cancer Institute (1980)