Canadian Splits Nobel Prize for Medicine

Ralph Steinman honoured for discovering how the immune system adapts to new threats just three days after he succumbed to cancer.

UPDATE: The Guardian reports that the Nobel Prize committee is unsure of what to do with the award won by the recently deceased Ralph Steinman, as the prizes are only awarded to living people. Steinman, a Montreal native, succumbed to pancreatic cancer just three days ago. Precedent says that Steinman can win the award posthumously so long as he was still alive when the jury decided on its winners. He had been diagnosed four years ago, but thanks in part to treatments he pioneered, Steinman was able to survive until this past Friday.

A Canadian-born scientist won the Nobel Prize for medicine today alongside researchers from the U.S. and Luxembourg for their research into the immune system. Ralph Steinman, who worked at Rockefeller University in New York but grew up in Canada and studied at McGill University, was posthumously awarded with half of the prize's $1.46-million purse, with the other half being split among Bruce Beutler and Jules Hoffman. Steinman, 68, had died three days earlier, on Sept. 30. He was honoured for discovering dendritic cells, which play a role in regulating the body's immune system in cleaning out harmful micro-organisms. Beutler and Hoffman won for discovering the proteins that are the first part of the immune system to recognize threats in the body. The trio were credited for "revolutionizing our understanding of the immune system" by the Nobel jury.