Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2025(nobelprize.org) |
Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2025(nobelprize.org) |
>Brunkow, meanwhile, got the news of her prize from an AP photographer who came to her Seattle home in the early hours of the morning. She said she had ignored the earlier call from the Nobel Committee. “My phone rang and I saw a number from Sweden and thought: ‘That’s just, that’s spam of some sort.’”
https://www.oregonlive.com/pacific-northwest-news/2025/10/sc...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_in_Phy...
He’ll be in for a surprise when he switches his phone back on.
The press release https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2025/press-releas...
The popular science article https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2025/popular-info...
And an advanced scientific paper usually written by the members of the commitee https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2025/10/advanced-medicine...
It's also a fairly weird and old fashioned name. The sort of thing that would have been in style 120 years ago. (Meiji and early Taisho era.) Japanese names today are usually less literal.
This Nobel is about peripheral tolerance, but you should first appreciate central tolerance to understand why it matters.
After the stem cell phase, just about every cell in your body gradually becomes locked in a specific program (differentiated/specialized) so that your heart cells lose the ability to express say lung proteins, and vice versa.
But in order to train your immune cells not to react to self, during development some cells in the thymus are allowed to express self proteins from every type of tissue, so your thymus expresses neural, heart, lung, etc.. proteins. Any T-cells that react with this self proteins are deleted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoimmune_regulator
However, central tolerance is not that efficient, so peripheral tolerance takes care of the T-cells which escaped central tolerance. A major way that this is accomplished is by counterintuitively maintaining a population of self-specific T-cells called regulatory T-cells which put the breaks on immune reactions in the presence of self antigen (antigen = 3D shape of protein or sugar).
In many ways tolerance is actually the default reaction of the immune system - you encounter too many foreign objects (in food, air, etc) to react to everything. That's why vaccines have an "adjuvant" compound which tells your immune system to react.
If one had an infected thymus, does this mean that immune cells would be eliminated for attacking the infection, and thus the immune system be tuned to ignore the present infection?
However most of this happens before birth, and thymus infection is pretty unlikely at that point - the baby is protected by the mom's antibodies and is also physically sequestered. If the unborn baby has a thymus infection I would be more worried about what the mother has.
Not sure what would be good popular science books. There is quite a lot on the immune system in the Alberts (Molecular Biology of the Cell), but that is maybe too much without solid biology background knowledge. The typical textbook is the Janeway (Immunology), but that's certainly too much.
What I liked as an introductory textbook in general was Campbell Biology, but that covers essentially all of Biology. There is a chapter on the immune system as well.
All those books are horribly expensive in the US, and still quite expensive in other countries, though.
Here's the 8th edition (2012):
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/dx0egzl37bfsl9ur6zsg1/janeway...
Tuesday: physics. Wednesday: chemistry. Thursday: literature. Friday: peace. Monday: economics.
I know there are plenty of other math awards out there, so it’s not really “worse” or anything, I have always just thought it was a weird omission.
> Although the Prize in Economic Sciences was not one of the original five Nobel Prizes established by Alfred Nobel's will, it is considered a member of the Nobel Prize system, and is administered and referred to along with the Nobel Prizes by the Nobel Foundation. Winners of the Prize in Economic Sciences are chosen in a similar manner to and announced alongside the Nobel Prize recipients, and receive the Prize in Economic Sciences at the Nobel Prize Award Ceremony.
Man frantically shakes whole body, then raises dramatically his fist and screams: - FOX...
https://breezewiki.com/metalgear/wiki/FOXDIE
> FOXDIE (originally rendered as FoxDie) was an engineered retrovirus developed by the DIA for the Pentagon. It was programmed to kill specific people by recognizing a person's DNA, causing cardiac arrest.
The economics one stands out for not being endowed by Nobel but instead Sveriges Riksbank well after his death (thus it's the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences).
But it's administered by the Nobel Foundation, etc.