Philosophy and the Nobel Prize for Medicine

This year the Nobel Prize in Medicine went to the perpetrators of a revolution in the treatment of cancer.

It went, specifically, to James P. Allison and Tasuku Honjo "for their discovery of cancer therapy by inhibition of negative immune regulation." The photo above is of Allison.

The idea has been in the air for more than a century that the deadliness of cancer is due to the fact that the normal human immune system does not regard cancer cells as "foreign matter." It recognizes those cells as "part of us." Friend, not foe. But that situation could be reversed. Early attempts at fighting cancer this way involved infecting a patient with bacteria to stimulate the immune system, with the idea that once stimulated it would not then go solely after the bacterial threat, but after cancer cells as well.

It didn't work all that well, although a variant of that approach remains helpful against bladder cancer.

More basic research had to pass as water under the bridge before scientists like Allison and Tasuku could go further.

Now, though, they seem to have cracked the nut. As the Nobel Prize committee's materials announcing the award helpfully explain: "[I]n 2010 an important clinical study showed striking effects in patients with advanced melanoma, a type of skin cancer. In several patients signs of remaining cancer disappeared. Such remarkable results had never been seen before in this patient group."   

There should be a philosophical point to this, should there not? I believe there is. The basic research that had to be done, before the old scheme of stimulating the body's own immune system against cancer cells could actually work, was research into how the body recognizes itself. What is "me" and what is "them."

This should stimulate thought on selfhood, on nothing less than human individuality. Even identical twins are different bodies and, despite the identical genome, my understanding is that material from one twin is in some danger of rejection by the system of the other twin.  Those who believe individualism to be an important moral principle (however it is to be interpreted) have this natural basis for it. My body very persistently regards itself as itself, and as uniquely itself. 

Sometimes medicine has to work to make the body more accepting of foreign matter (as with the drugs that characteristically accompany transplanted organs), sometimes medicine works to make the body less accepting and more trigger happy (as with the new cancer treatments). The important take away, though, is that uniqueness and self-preservation are facts that precede any conceptualization.

Enjoy the Nobel money, doctors: it has been nobly won.