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 wate...
