Baruj Benacerraf - Telegraph

Baruj Benacerraf was born on October 29 1920, in Caracas, Venezuela, the son of Sephardic Jews. His father, born in Morocco, had emigrated to Venezuela at the turn of the 20th century and, with his brother, built up a successful shoe and textile business and started a bank.

Baruj spent most of his childhood in Paris, where his family moved so that his father could buy textiles for resale in Venezuela. At the outbreak of the Second World War the Benacerrafs moved to New York, where Baruj took a degree in Biology at Columbia University in 1942.

As a child Baruj often missed school because of asthma, an affliction that fuelled his interest in immunology and, after graduation from Columbia, he decided to study Medicine instead of joining the family business. Despite a shining academic record, he was rejected by 25 medical schools, including Columbia, Yale and Harvard: “At that time, it was very hard for Jews to get into medical school,” he recalled. “This country was strongly anti-Semitic. There were quotas. In addition, there was a tendency not to take in foreigners.” Ironically it was the Medical College of Virginia, a state that had enshrined racial segregation, that eventually admitted him, though only because the father of a friend was an administrator there.

Towards the end of the war Benacerraf was commissioned into the US Army Medical Corps; he was posted to Germany in 1946, and later to France, where he worked at the military hospital of Nancy.

In 1947 he was recruited by the immunologist Lewis Thomas to work as a research fellow at New York University. But in 1949, when his father, who had returned to Paris, was incapacitated by a stroke, he accepted a position in the city so that he could oversee and eventually dispose of his father’s business interests there. He was director of research at the National Centre for Scientific Research at Broussais Hospital when his father died in 1953; three years later Baruj Benacerraf returned to New York to begin the research that would win him a share of the Nobel Prize.

After leaving New York University in 1966 Benacerraf worked, briefly, as head of the immunology laboratory at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease in Bethesda, Maryland, before becoming chairman of the department of pathology at Harvard Medical School. From 1980 to 1991 he was president of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, where he transformed a budget deficit into a healthy surplus in two years, not least by giving it his share of the Nobel Prize money.

Baruj Benacerraf was the author of well over 500 scientific papers and was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences.

In 1943 he married Annette Dreyfus, a fellow refugee from Paris and the niece of Jacques Monod, who would share the 1965 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his work on bacterial enzymes. She died in June and he is survived by their daughter, Beryl Benacerraf, a professor at Harvard Medical School.