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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."
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.
would they ever give the protein folding gamers a Nobel prize? Probably not - but they did make a significant contribution to science.
As far as I know they have not awarded a hard science prize merely for being donors. Otherwise I'm sure over the past century or two the humble lab rat would have earned a prize by now.
Also engineering achievements, at least solely with respect to being an engineering achievement, never win a prize.
For example, the politicians who paid for CERN have never won a prize (at least not for donating CERN funds). The engineers who design particle detectors never win a prize (design as in mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, civil engineering, not design as in basic concept of operation). However the '92 physics prize was awarded to the inventor of the multiwire proportional chamber (a gross simplification is its kinda like a 3-d geiger counter instead of being a 0-d scalar detector, sorta)
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Ralph Steinman has died, he might not be awarded the Nobel after all. http://newswire.rockefeller.edu/?page=engine&id=1192
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.