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3 Share Nobel Prize In Medicine For Immune System Work
alphadogg writes "This year's Nobel Laureates have revolutionized our understanding of the immune system by discovering key principles for its activation. Scientists have long been searching for the gatekeepers of the immune response by which man and other animals defend themselves against attack by bacteria and other microorganisms. Bruce Beutler and Jules Hoffmann discovered receptor proteins that can recognize such microorganisms and activate innate immunity, the first step in the body's immune response. Ralph Steinman discovered the dendritic cells of the immune system and their unique capacity to activate and regulate adaptive immunity, the later stage of the immune response during which microorganisms are cleared from the body."
Medine..?
Nice to know that the editors are doing their job.
Makes me wonder - would they ever give the protein folding gamers a Nobel prize? Probably not - but they did make a significant contribution to science. Then again, maybe award it to the project to help it fund further crowd-sourced applications.
AP says Steinman died September 30th (will get link after posting). Nobel prize not awarded posthumously, apparently.
A single person should win the nobel prize. They should not split it into multiple pieces, it cheapens it. What's next, 125 people share the Nobel prize? This is BS.
The Nobel Prize has lost all meaning after they gave it to Obama the Nobel Prize in Peace, this worths less than nothing
Ralph Steinman has died, he might not be awarded the Nobel after all. http://newswire.rockefeller.edu/?page=engine&id=1192
Given that the Nobel Prize is given out before any accomplishments nowadays, I'm excited to see what these researchers will produce now that they have their prize. Cure for cancer? Panacea? Perhaps they will discover perfect medical immortality! Damn, those are some exciting things they might do in the future - better give them the Peace Prize too, just in case!
This is what Nobel prize should be about - not about politics and non-sciences, like Keynesian witch craft of one solution.
Giving a prize for figuring out how the immune system works? Good.
Giving out a 'war is peace' prize to Obama or 'print till you run out of trees' Krugman? Well, that's just a political statement and I am not sure what good it is at all.
You can't handle the truth.
On the other hand, the peace prize can be given to hundards. (2007, Al Gore & the mbembers of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change)
Obama got the peace prize because his election held promise that American's were finally willing to accept that unAmericans were important too,
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
here's a lay translation of the work these men did on immunology. oooga booga moof moof moof, bajawigagawaaa. baga wooo. woo, moofa moofa, ooga moo woo wo baga. Baga wigamafa.
"Why not award it posthumous, it has been done before."
When was that done?!
What is the importance of the Nobel Prize itself?
Yes, it is important to the winners. But, for the rest of the world? Does it give focus to something we need to recognize, also today, 110 year after the start?
I think it is still important, but sometimes you people complaining about it, which made me wonder.
What do you think?
I've just learned that one of the three, Mr. Ralf Steinman, has died last Friday; ironically, he has died of cancer of the pancreas (not sure of my medical English, here) although his life had apparently been extended by a treatment based on his own research work. The committee is pondering what to do: the rules state that no-one can receive the Nobel prize posthumously, although an exception is made when a winner dies between the official announcement and the ceremony. Here, the winner has died just before the announcement...
the regulations of the Nobel committee do NOT state that the prize can be awarded after the announcement. There is no mention whatsoever of an announcement in the regulations. They state, clearly, that the work of a dead scientist cannot be considered by the committee, implying the scientist has to be living while he is being considered. Unless a significant part of the "consideration" of the nobel committee was carried out during the weekend, Ralph should "keep" his prize. Given that Ralph had been a shoo-in for the prize for years already I'd say the committee did consider him enough while alive.
a grieving colleague of Ralph.
as I'm a person with such a disorder. Specifically, my body does not produce immuneglobin, which can make me very susceptible to disease. My triggering event was in 2009 when I had pneumonia four times in five months, fortunately I had no permanent lung damage as a result. I have to infuse immuneglobin into my abdomen weekly to stay reasonably healthy (four needles/90 minutes/twice a week, I recently did my 200th infusion).
For the most part, it's a life-long genetic condition, and we had indicators that I did get sick more often than most people, but it took this mini-crisis for me to get diagnosed and treated. There is no cure as of yet. My specific disorder is that my body's B cells do not produce immuneglobin in response to the presence of infection. They have successfully forced/tricked B cells to produce IG in a petri dish, but have not yet succeeded at that rat level.
Which brings us to the interesting part. I've heard a theory that immune system shut-down could actually be a form of defensive mechanism. For certain types of immunodeficiency they have successfully turned the immune system back on, but they've had a very high incidence of tumors later. So it's possible that an immune system clamps down and stops producing certain types of immuneglobin so that the body doesn't start producing cancer.
Interesting concept. They've also seen a reduction in certain cancer rates for people on immuneglobin therapy, and since I'll be doing this for the rest of my life, that's small compensation.
Treatment is expensive, it takes portions of 10,000 plasma donations to produce one treatment. That's a pretty scary scale to me.
When you sympathize with stupidity, you start thinking like an idiot.
If they give Steinman his prize, might they give Rosalind Franklin hers? A longer period of deceasedness, I admit (okay, fifty-three years) but she damn well deserves one.
A lot of the work in innate immunity is pretty old. There are about 400 new studies a month published on VDR and innate immunity alone (for those not privy, VDR controls in large degree transcription of many of those toll like receptors that determine friend from foe in the innate immune system).
Sadly, even having worked on it, I was not aware of either the work of Hoffman, or Beutler in the field. Of course, there is a lot of stuff happening there, and its pretty much buried in the fog of so much work coming out. To the folks that mention folding at home ... None of the stuff I've worked on would be possible without protein folding, distributed computing aided sequencing, and programs like autodock that take away some of the tediousness of trying to find out if your ligand can really bind there, to what degree, and to aid in side effect prediction. The modern day pharmaceutical researcher cannot get by without having some pretty good computer skills, or hiring out for it, and very little of this type of research is happening in isolation because of it. Generally its teams of people making it happen, and a highly skilled IT component.
In the world of NDA's, I can't comment much more except to say I'm shocked they picked this work, and not some of the useful work that was developed independently, and has more immediate applications.
Perhaps Steinman wasn't certainly dead until the committee was informed of which world they were now in (the world where Steinman died on Friday), and therefore the normal rules of the award don't need to be broken to give him the prize. That is, when the committee made the announcement, Steinman was both dead and alive? I'm conflating theories, I know, but please understand I have no idea what I'm talking about.
It is quite amusing how educational and research institutions try to immediately flaunt their affiliations with the Nobel Laureates. Bruce A. Beutler is a particularly intriguing case. The University of Chicago chalks this up as laureate number 86 as he attended medical school there. The Scripps Research Institute where he was a professor until recently is hailing him as their own. This is despite that as of Septermber 1, 2011, Prof. Beutler is now Director of the Center for the Genetics of Host Defense at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, where he was a medical resident and a professor from 1986 to 2000 (and began his nobel laureate work).
Nonetheless, congratulations to Dr. Bruce A. Beutler on his award, and all the institutions which fostered his career. Best wishes to him as he joins a growing cadre of formidable researchers in Texas (yes, the same Texas as GH Bush, GW Bush, and presidential candidate Rick Perry).
References
Shaw Prize Autobiography
http://www.shawprize.org/en/shaw.php?tmp=3&twoid=90&threeid=180&fourid=306&fiveid=153
UT Southwestern Press Release
http://www.utsouthwestern.edu/utsw/cda/dept353744/files/654940.html
http://www.utsouthwestern.edu/utsw/cda/dept353744/files/638281.html
Scripps Research Institute Press Release
http://www.scripps.edu/news/press_releases/nobelprize.html
The University of Chicago front page (right side):
http://www.uchicago.edu/
I'm confused by the word 'portion' in that last sentence. Is it the variety that's really important, even if the portion of the donation is very small?
In other words, if you used each donation only for producing treatments, does mixing together 10,000 donations get you 10,000 treatments, or 5,000, or 5, or what?
You are awash in a sea of fiercely stated opinions. Obvious exits are: 'File->Quit', 'Reply', and 'Page Down'.
Unfortunately I didn't attend the panel on how the product is made when I attended a conference earlier this year. It is my understanding that if you give a plasma donation or sell plasma, the immuneglobin (Ig) constitutes a fairly small amount as the plasma is filtered from your whole blood. The Ig has to be further processed through filtration, purification, inspection, concentration, etc., until it ends up in the bottle that I just finished infusing. I infuse 10 grams a week (50 ml), I have no idea how many grams of Ig are in a liter of plasma (typical amount of a donation/sale). The plasma is not used exclusively for treatments for conditions like mine, a lot of other treatments are derived from it.
The variety is important. Since I don't produce antibodies, I get them from donors through this donation/concentration process. I still get tetanus shots every decade or whatever and flu vaccines annually, but I can't do live vaccines like FluMist where they spray it up your nose, I'm also not supposed to be exposed to people who do live vaccines, which is a little tricky. There's a definite down-side to it: you can't run antibody tests on me because the results are unreliable since I'm receiving 10,000 people's antibodies. Earlier this year I was mildly sick for a few months and we thought it could be mono, but the conventional test for it is an Epstein-Barr test and the EBV is an antibody-based test, so the results were inconclusive and we shouldn't have wasted the money and resources on it.
I'll ask about the scale on an immunology board that I frequent, I might be able to get an answer there.
When you sympathize with stupidity, you start thinking like an idiot.
The answer that I got was that 10,000 plasma donations are pooled for one batch to get a good mix of antibodies. Each donation is less than a liter, though I didn't get an exact number, and one donation is 4 grams of IgG, so I personally need 10 donation equivalents per month (I receive 4 weeks of meds per shipment, so we call that a month). I don't think you can easily say that the average treatment is X grams per month as it varies wildly depending on the person's problems, treatment and body weight.
When you sympathize with stupidity, you start thinking like an idiot.
Hats of to the Commitee for deciding to grant Ralph Steinman the prize. The rule obviously exists to promote, award and acknowledge NEW research and all his research was 'up to date'. Literally. See: http://life.time.mk/read/bb9f5c9af7/abd2c5124a/index.html
It's getting to where they're basically just avoiding a first place Nobel prize and two runners-up Nobel prizes.