The family of medical researcher Ralph Steinman (on screen), winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize in medicine, speaks at press conference 3 October 2011 at Rockefeller University in New York.
Credit: AFP PHOTO/Stan HONDA
WASHINGTON: The ultimate lifetime achievement award came days too late for Canadian Ralph Steinman, who was honoured overnight with the Nobel Prize for Medicine for his groundbreaking work on the immune system.
The 68-year-old cell biologist's own discoveries helped extend his life, but he died on Friday after a four-year battle with pancreatic cancer, his daughter said.
"We said to him, 'Hang on until Monday,'" said Alexis Steinman, 34. "We joked, we said, 'You know you got to keep going until the Nobel.'"
His hopes were raised a few years ago when he heard he was on the short list for the Nobel Prize. He did not win that year, she recalled, but the family has considered the possibility every year since.
Sharing the prize
Steinman shared the award with Bruce Beutler of the United States and Luxembourg-born Jules Hoffmann, a naturalised French citizen, for their work on the body's complex defense system in which signaling molecules unleash antibodies and killer cells to respond to invading microbes.
Understanding this throws open the door to new drugs and also tackling immune disorders, such as asthma, rheumatoid arthritis and Crohn's disease, in which the body mysteriously attacks itself.
In 1998, Beutler made a major discovery in the receptor for lipopolysaccharide (LPS), which revealed how mammals sense infection, and how certain inflammatory diseases begin. Beutler and Hoffman shared the 2007 Balzan Prize for Innate Immunity and, last week, the Shaw Prize.
They split one half of the 10 million Swedish kronor (US$1.48 million) Nobel prize, while the other half goes to the family of Steinman. "I think it is a great tragedy that he didn't live quite long enough to know that he had won the Nobel Prize," said Beutler, who knew Steinman for nearly 30 years.
Not typical practice
The Nobel committee in Stockholm, Sweden said it would stand by the award, even though it is typically not given out posthumously.
"We just got the information. What we can do now is only to regret that he could not experience the joy," Goeran Hansson, the head of the Nobel assembly at Karolinska Institutet, said.
According to the committee's rules, "work produced by a person since deceased shall not be considered for an award. If, however, a prizewinner dies before he has received the prize, then the prize may be presented."
Laying the foundation
Steinman was born in Montreal, Canada on 14 January 1943, and earned his medical degree from Harvard University in 1968. He and his collaborator Zanvil Cohn discovered in 1973 a new cell type called the dendritic cell.
Steinman "speculated that it could be important in the immune system and went on to test whether dendritic cells could activate T cells, a cell type that has a key role in adaptive immunity," said the Nobel committee. "These findings were initially met with skepticism but subsequent work by Steinman demonstrated that dendritic cells have a unique capacity to activate T cells."
Tessier-Lavigne said his research "laid the foundation for numerous discoveries in the critically important field of immunology, and it has led to innovative new approaches in how we treat cancer, infectious diseases and disorders of the immune system."
Had an inkling
Steinman began work at Rockefeller University in 1970 as a postdoctoral fellow and was named director of the Christopher Browne Centre for Immunology and Immune Diseases in 1998. He received a host of honours during his life, including the 2007 Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research and the 2009 Albany Medical Centre Prize in Medicine and Biomedical Research, which he shared with Beutler.
"I think it is a great tragedy that he didn't live quite long enough to know that he had won the Nobel Prize," Beutler said. "He had received many other prestigious awards. He knew he was in line for it (a Nobel), that's for sure."
American Bruce Beutler and Luxembourg-born French national Jules Hoffman shared the Nobel Prize with Steinman, a Canadian native who died days earlier of pancreatic cancer.
