On Oct. 10, 1980, The Nobel Foundation announced they had awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology to Baruj Benacerraf, Jean Dausset and George Snell for their discoveries concerning “genetically determined structures on the cell surface that regulate immunological reactions.”

During the 1960s Benaceraff showed through studies of guinea pigs that the immune system’s reaction to certain substances is determined by genes that exist in a certain area on a certain chromosome.