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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."
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.
I think the limit is 3 persons. This is actually a problem as many scientific discoveries today are done in teams much larger than that.
In the very first year of the Nobel Prizes the Peace Prize was shared between two people. This is nothing new, and I've yet to find anyone drinking alone sobbing to themselves that their life is a failure because they had to share a Nobel Prize.
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
Ralph Steinman has died, he might not be awarded the Nobel after all. http://newswire.rockefeller.edu/?page=engine&id=1192
I am not sure what good it is at all.
Some of the most important historical physics experiments were negative result or "failure". Michealson-Morley aether / speed of light interferometer which stubbornly refused to show light goes faster pointed ahead of earths orbit as compared to pointed behind earths orbit. The noise level in that giant microwave horn antenna is too blasted high to be useful for communications when pointed at the sky, celestial noise, WTF is it? I'm trying to think of some more good examples... Trying to detect high intensity infrared light (vs UV) using old fashioned photocathodes...
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Uhh, nothing's changed. There are different categories for the Nobel Prizes: Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, Literature, Economics, and Peace.
The three science prizes will always be about science, and the others will always be contentious and to varying degrees political.
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
Except that there is no Nobel Prize in Economics. The Economics prize is a prize given by the Swedish "Fed", Riksbanken on honor of Nobel.
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.
It was ridiculous three times over:
1. It was highly and obviously politically partisan.
2. It was speculative, fueled by hopes and fantasy rather than any results.
3. They were wrong.
It wasn't the only example, of course; the peace prize has been awarded for ludicrous reasons before. The Nobel's science prizes still have a pretty good reputation, though.
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.