George Snell shared the 1980 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Baruj Benacerraf and Jean Dausset for their discoveries concerning "genetically determined structures on the cell surface that regulate immunological reactions".
His father (who was born in Minnesota) worked as a secretary for the local YMCA; he invented a device for winding induction coils for motorboat engines.
Snell was educated in the Brookline, Massachusetts schools and then enrolled at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire where he continued his passion for mathematics and science, focusing on genetics.
On the recommendation of John Gerould, his genetics professor at Dartmouth, Snell did graduate work at Harvard University with William E. Castle, the first American biologist to look for Mendelian inheritance in mammals.
[2]"If it were to be research, mouse genetics was the clear choice and the Jackson Laboratory, founded in 1929 by Dr. Clarence Cook Little, one of Castle's earlier students, almost the inevitable selection as a place to work."
After brief stints as teachers, in 1935 Snell joined the staff of The Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor on Mount Desert Island on the coast of Maine and he remained there for the entire balance of his long career.