Snell, George Davis (1903-1996), was an American geneticist who discovered the genes responsible for the rejection of tissue transplants. He shared the 1980 Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine with two other researchers who studied the genetic regulation of the immune system, Baruj Benacerraf of the United States and Jean Dausset of France.
Snell began the work that won the Nobel Prize in the 1940’s, conducting research on mice to determine which genes controlled whether a transplant was accepted or rejected. He developed strains of mice that were genetically identical except for a single gene. He found that a set of genes that he called histocompatability genes determined whether tissue grafts were accepted or rejected by the body. Mice with the same histocompatability genes accepted grafts from each other. Those with different histocompatability genes did not.
Other scientists, including Dausset, later found that all mammals, including human beings, have a similar set of genes controlling transplant rejection. The gene group became known as the major histocompatability complex.
Snell was born in Bradford, Massachusetts. He graduated from Dartmouth College in 1926 and earned a doctorate from Harvard University in 1930. He held a series of short-term teaching and research positions until 1935. That year, he became a researcher at the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, a private research center devoted to mammalian genetics. He remained at the Jackson Laboratory until he retired in 1973.
