Baruj Benacerraf was born on this day, October 29, in 1920. He was a Venezuelan-American immunologist, who shared the 1980 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the “discovery of the major histocompatibility complex genes which encode cell surface protein molecules important for the immune system’s distinction between self and non-self.”

He was photographed in 1988 during his tenure as president of the Dana Farber Cancer Institute and is one of several Nobel Prize winners in our archives.