The 2011 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to Bruce A. Beutler, Jules A. Hoffmann and Ralph M. Steinman.
Beutler and Hoffmann were honoured for “their discoveries concerning the activation of innate immunity”, while the other half of the prize was given to Steinman for “his discovery of the dendritic cell and its role in adaptive immunity”. “This year’s Nobel Laureates have revolutionized our understanding of the immune system by discovering key principles for its activation,” says the Nobel summary.
Beutler works at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. Hoffmann was formerly director of the Institute for Molecular Cell Biology in Strasbourg. Steinman is a professor at Rockefeller University in New York.
UPDATE: According to a statement released today by Rockefeller, Steinman died on Friday.
Nobel prizes cannot be awarded posthumously and the Nobel statutes state, “Work produced by a person since deceased shall not be considered for an award. If, however, a prize winner dies before he has received the prize, then the prize may be presented.” This happened in 1996 with economist William Vickrey.
A spokeswomen for the Nobel office said that the committee awarding the medicine prize met at 9.00 today to decide the award and was unaware that Steinman had died before this. The spokeswoman would not comment on speculation that the prize might have to be removed.
UPDATE: The Nobel Assembly just announced that Steinman’s Nobel will stand. Although the Nobel Foundation rules prohibit posthumous awards, the Assembly decided that the spirit of that rule was intended to prevent awards given long after someone has died. “However, the decision to award the Nobel Prize to Ralph Steinman was made in good faith, based on the assumption that the Nobel Laureate was alive. This was true – though not at the time of the decision – only a day or so previously,” the assembly said in a statement.
Read Nature’s full coverage of the medicine Nobel here.
See also:
Hoffmann and Beutler earlier this year shared the Shaw prize for Life Science and Medicine with Yale University’s Ruslan Medzhitov – Bright lights shine for Shaw prizes.
Innate immune sensing and its roots: the story of endotoxin by Bruce Beutler and Ernst Rietsche, from Nature Reviews Immunology in 2003.
Jules Hoffmann recounts his team’s pioneering work on insect immunity in Nature Immunology from 2007 and reviews the immune response of Drosophila in this 2003 piece in Nature.
Ralph Steinman discussed his work with dendritic cells with Nature Medicine in 2001.