November 1982
Peter Medawar, a British zoologist, shared the 1960 Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine with Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet for the discovery of acquired immunological tolerance. Following World War II, Medawar worked on skin grafts and discovered that the success of a graft depends on how closely related the donor and recipient are. In 1953 he found that, by injecting tissue cells from adult mice into developing mice embryos, the younger mice then were able to receive successful skin grafts from the donor mice. This discovery of acquired immunological tolerance paved the way for later work on suppressing the rejection of organ transplants. (deceased 10/2/87)
