Unknown author · Public domain

Baruj Benacerraf, born in Caracas to a Sephardic Jewish family, was rejected by every American medical school he applied to except the Medical College of Virginia — discrimination against Jewish applicants was still routine in 1942. He went on to identify the immune response genes that determine how the body distinguishes self from non-self, foundational work on what became known as the major histocompatibility complex, and shared the 1980 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Jean Dausset and George Davis Snell for it.