Jean Dausset - Early Life

Early Life

Jean-Baptiste-Gabriel-Joachim Dausset was born on October 19, 1916, in Toulouse, France. He was the youngest of four children of Henri Dausset and Elisabeth Dausset (born Renard). His father was from the Pyrenees, and was a doctor by profession, and his mother was a housewife from Lorraine. Following the end of World War I the Dausset family moved to Biarritz where Jean spent most of his childhood. His father was head doctor at the Bayonne Hospital, a position that would make a great impression on Jean. Dausset was home schooled by his mother, as well as by a tutor, who would periodically come to the house. At the age of 11, Dausset and his family moved to Paris. He began his formal schooling at the Lycée Michel, at age 15. After earning his baccalaureate in mathematics, Dausset was convinced by his father to study medicine at the University of Paris. Both of Dausset’s parents died just after he became an extern at the Paris Hospitals, at the age of 19. Dausset failed to pass an internship entrance exam at the Paris Hospitals, and was preparing for a second attempt when World War II broke out.

Read more about this topic:  Jean Dausset

Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:

    “Love is the hardest thing in the world to write about. So simple. You’ve got to catch it through details, like the early morning sunlight hitting the gray tin of the rain spout in front of her house. The ringing of a telephone that sounds like Beethoven’s “Pastoral.” A letter scribbled on her office stationery that you carry around in your pocket because it smells of all the lilacs in Ohio.”
    —Billy Wilder (b. 1906)

    “Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.”
    —Martin Amis (b. 1949)