The Nobel Foundation today awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine to three immune system pioneers. Bruce Beutler of the UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas and Jules Hoffmann of the University of Strasbourg in France will split half of the 10 million Swedish kronor ($1.5 million) prize for their work on the activation of the immune system through the Toll pathway. The other half was awarded to Ralph Steinman, an immunologist at Rockefeller University in New York, for his discovery that dendritic cells are key to next stage in the body’s defenses.

However, unbeknownst to the Nobel organizers until after the award’s announcement came out early this morning, Steinman had died on Friday (30 September) after a four-year battle with pancreatic cancer. He was 68.

“The events that have occurred are unique and, to the best of our knowledge, are unprecedented in the history of the Nobel Prize,” the Nobel Foundation said in a press release this afternoon. "According to the statutes of the Nobel Foundation, work produced by a person since deceased shall not be given an award. However, the statutes specify that if a person has been awarded a prize and has died before receiving it, the prize may be presented.

From the award’s creation in 1895 until 1974, the prize could be given posthumously only if the awardee died after he or she was nominated. As the Nobel Prize Watch blog explains, the rules changed in 1974 to only allow posthumous awards if the winner died between the time of the prize announcement and the actual award ceremony (which, this year, is scheduled for 10 December). This situation has only happened once, in 1996, when the prize in Economic Science was awarded to William Vickrey, who died three days after the announcement.

The circumstances of Steinman’s death posed a tricky situation for the Nobel Foundation. Steinman died before the announcement was made, and thus the prize should not have been awarded in the first place. But the deed has been done, and now the prize officials had a hard decision on the table: Should they retract the award and possibly come off as coldhearted, or give a large sum of money to his family outside of the rule book?

As the Foundation noted, “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 Nobel Foundation thus believes that what has occurred is more reminiscent of the example in the statutes concerning a person who has been named as a Nobel Laureate and has died before the actual Nobel Prize Award Ceremony.”

For more on Steinman’s career, read this profile from the October 2001 issue of Nature Medicine, or a 2007 perspective from the late scientist on his pioneering discoveries of dendritic cells.

Image: Courtesy of Rockefeller University via the Nobel Prize website