Obits in Brief

Wayne Allwine

Wayne Allwine, who died on 18 May aged 62, was an actor who voiced Mickey Mouse for more than 30 years.

Born in southern California, Allwine joined Disney in 1966 when he took a job in the mailroom. He went on to work in the sound effects department and began voicing Mickey Mouse in 1977. His falsetto can be heard in 1983's Mickey's Christmas Carol, 1988's Who Framed Roger Rabbit and at Disney theme parks around the world.

Allwine was the third man behind Mickey's voice. The first was Walt Disney, then Jimmy MacDonald, who became Allwine's mentor. Allwine recalled: "He said, 'Just remember kid, you're only filling in for the boss.'"

Jean Dausset

The French immunologist Jean Dausset, who died on 6 June aged 92, shared the 1980 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering and characterising genes making up the histocompatibility complex. Histocompatibility, the degree of similarity between certain antigens, affects whether tissues can be transplanted from one person to another.

Dausset was born in Toulouse in 1916. Serving with the Free French forces in Tunisia in the Second World War, he performed blood transfusions, his introduction to immunohaematology. After the War he studied at Harvard and later returned to France, becoming laboratory director of the National Blood Transfusion Centre. His autobiography, Clin d'oeil à la vie ("A Wink at Life"), was published in 1998.