October 29th is Baruj Benacerraf's birthday. Benacerraf is a Venezuelan immunologist who discovered immune response genes. He was researching immune response from immunization on guinea pigs when he discovered some of the guinea pigs' immune systems would respond to the foreign substance and others would not. When he bred the one group with the other, he isolated the gene that appeared to control the immune response in the guinea pigs. He called this the Ir gene for immune response. He also discovered it was part of the recently discovered major histocompatibility complex (MHC) which is a larger gene located in a particular chromosome. This research became a launch point to identify Ir genes in several organisms including humans. Find out what else occurred on this day in science history.
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