I don’t tend to pay a lot of attention to the Nobel Prizes.
The exceptions are the Peace, Economics, and Literature prizes, since these are the only areas where there is at least some non-zero likelihood that I’ll have heard of the winner, and maybe even be a bit familiar with their work.
Unless the person is local, I tend not to drill down and read anything about the prizes in physics, chemistry, and medicine.
But it’s hard to resist the story about Ralph Steinman, who died three days before it was announced that he’d been awarded the prize in medicine. Although there is a stipulation that the Nobels only go to the living, the Nobel committee decided that, given that they had awarded the prize believing that Steinman would survive, the prize would stand.
My guess is that, at the point in which the Nobel decision was made, Steinman was still living. The awards were announced on Monday morning – Steinman had died on Friday, but his family had not yet disclosed his death – and it’s certainly doubtful that the Nobel-ers got up on Monday morning, picked their winners, and sent the e-mail out the same day. Even employee-of-the-month awards are decided with a bit more deliberation than that.
Steinman’s family found out about the award when they checked his cell phone on Monday morning, and discovered the ‘you have been chosen’ message. Cynics among us may choose to believe that the Steinman family gamed the announcement of his death a bit to make sure that the news didn’t come out until after the Nobel news was released – his employer, Rockefeller University, had not even been informed of his death until the Nobel announcement – but that would be the cynics among us. And even if his family had held back the news because they didn’t want to cloud the Nobel prize decision, so what? From all sources, it certainly sounds as if Steinman had been expected to win at some point and that he was, in fact, past due.
As someone who only gets a ‘you have been chosen’ message from bogus time shares awarding me free vacations, I think it’s a colossal bummer that Ralph Steinman didn’t live to hear this news. Maybe in some Shirley Maclaine/Uri Geller way, he kinda/sorta knew. (Sneer if you will. It’s certainly possible that at some point telepathic communication will be proven.)
Another interesting aspect of Steinman’s career – which was spent researching how cells fight disease – is that he used his own research, and may have been able to prolong his own life by doing so. He managed to fight off pancreatic cancer, which usually kills in a year or two, for four years.
Steinman discovered so-called dendritic cells in 1973. These cells regulate the activity of other cells — Steinman called them the conductor of the immune system.
"When he got sick, he realized he needed to call upon these cells to induce a strong enough immune response to fight his tumor, and that is what he did," said Dr. Sarah Schlesinger, clinical director for his lab.
Steinman tried eight to 10 experimental therapies approved by the federal government, focusing in various ways on revving up his immune system to fight his cancer, she said.
Others dispute the suggestion that Steinman had success with his medical researcher, heal thyself attempts, and that it was likely chemo and luck of the draw that placed him as an outlier in the pancreatic cancer survival sweeps. They fear that desperate patients will be given false hope by Steinman’s relatively long survival.
Personally, I prefer to believe that work he had begun decades ago – and which ended just a few days before he died, when he last spent time in his research lab - did help him hang on a bit longer than he might have. Too bad he couldn’t have hung on for another week or so.
Source of info for this post: AP article.
No comments:
Post a Comment