Baruj Benacerraf, Nobel laureate, 90
Baruj Benacerraf, MD, who earned a 1980 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his groundbreaking research in immunology and led Dana-Farber Cancer Institute through a period of tremendous growth beginning that year, died in Boston on Aug. 2 at the age of 90. Benacerraf’s medical legacy is broad. As a physician-scientist, he discovered that genetic factors play a central role in the function of the immune system, a finding that paved the way for most of modern immunology and earned the Nobel Prize for him and colleagues Jean Dausset, MD (of the Université de Paris) and George D. Snell, PhD (of Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine). As president of Dana-Farber, Benacerraf helped the institution expand both physically and scientifically. He recruited top researchers and clinicians from around the world to Dana-Farber’s Boston campus, where they could also serve as teaching professors at Harvard Medical School next door. He himself...