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Nobel Prize in Medicine


Welcome to "science week" at my humble blog.

To begin: the standout in the Nobel Prize awards this year, the one likely most fascinating to observers outside the field itself, is ... Medicine.  This year's award for advances in medicine went to researchers who opened up new vistas in the study of immunity.

Immunity, and related matters such as vaccination -- these have been on a lot of minds of non-experts since the Covid epidemic, and even more intensely since a rogue member of the Kennedy family became the US Secretary of Health. The apotheosis of the non-expert.   

The Nobel Prize winners were rewarded for their discoveries concerning peripheral immune tolerance. Breaking that down a bit: "immune tolerance" means simply that our immune systems tolerate our own tissue.  The system doesn't go after our own tissue in the ways it goes after foreign matter.

So ... anyone who doesn't have an autoimmune disorder such as lupus or multiple sclerosis by definition has immune tolerance.

There are, though, two sorts of immune tolerance: central and peripheral. Central immune tolerance concerns the tendency of the body not to create T or B cells that would attack the body's own tissue in the first place. T cells develop within the thymus, while B cells develop in bone marrow. In each context, these little soldiers are trained to know native from foreign while still in their respective cradles.

Peripheral immune tolerance, then, is a fail-safe system when the central system fails. T or B cells sometimes slip out of the cradle without being able to distinguish proper from improper targets. The research of the three winners of this Nobel involved, for example, the identification of a specific gene, known now as FOXP3, involved in regulating self-reactivity outside the thymus or bone marrow.  The work has led to therapies: when both the body's central and peripheral regulators of immune tolerance both fail and auto-immune disease happens, help -- it now appears -- can be brought in from outside.   

The scientists so rewarded for these efforts are: Mary E. Brunkow (of the US, born 1961), Fred Ramsdell (also US, born 1960) and Shimon Sakaguchi (Japan, born 1951). That's Brunkow, above.


 



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