- Person
- Ralph Steinman
- Lived
- 1943–2011
- Field
- Immunology
- From
- Canadian
The story
Ralph Steinman was born in Montreal in 1943 into an Ashkenazi Jewish family; his father, a Jewish immigrant from Eastern Europe, ran a clothing store in Sherbrooke, Quebec, and hoped his son would join the business. Instead Steinman studied at McGill and Harvard Medical School and in 1970 joined the laboratory of Zanvil Cohn and James Hirsch at Rockefeller University in New York, where everyone was studying macrophages, the scavenger cells that swallow microbes.
Immunologists then faced a puzzle. Lymphocytes, the cells that recognise specific invaders, responded poorly to foreign substances on their own; they needed help from some other accessory cell. Examining cells from the spleens of mice, Steinman noticed an unusual cell that looked and behaved unlike a macrophage. It did not swallow particles and kept extending and retracting long branching arms. In 1973, with Cohn, he described it in the Journal of Experimental Medicine and named it the dendritic cell, from the Greek word for tree.
In 1978, with Margit Witmer, Steinman showed that dendritic cells were extraordinarily potent at activating T cells, the lymphocytes that direct immune responses and form immune memory. The idea met scepticism and even ridicule for years, but he and others went on to show that dendritic cells sit at the body's entry points, capture invaders, and present them to T cells to launch an attack, while also helping the immune system avoid attacking the body's own tissues.
Steinman died of pancreatic cancer on September 30, 2011, three days before the Nobel Assembly announced that he had won half of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Because the decision had been made in good faith, the prize was allowed to stand. The Nobel committee said such discoveries had made possible improved vaccines against infections and attempts to stimulate the immune system to attack tumours.
Why it matters
Dendritic cells are now central to the design of vaccines and cancer immunotherapies and to understanding autoimmune disease and transplant rejection.
About Ralph Steinman
Montreal-born immunologist who discovered dendritic cells, the sentinels that switch on the body’s defences, opening new paths to vaccines and cancer treatment. Nobel Prize 2011.
Sources
- Press release: The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2011 NobelPrize.org
- Ralph M. Steinman, Biographical NobelPrize.org
- Nobel laureate Ralph Steinman dies at 68 The Rockefeller University
- Ralph M. Steinman Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.