Funny anecdote that Dr. Brunkow thought she was being spammed when the Nobel Committee tried to inform her:
>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.’”
Am I understanding correctly that this Nobel prize is for work that was completed over 20 years ago? I'm not a biologist but it sounds like they discovered regulatory T cells together, which sounds relatively major. Is it typical for a Nobel prize to lag that kind of discovery for decades? Or is it only now that we understand how major the discovery was? Or maybe I'm just misunderstanding the discovery and the timeline.
I can’t say I would react too differently. There are so many emails or phone calls claiming you’ve won a big award or sum of money that end up being scams.
There's usually two pieces, a short one that can be taken as is for the general press and another which goes more in depth at a university level I would say.
It's a win for nominative determinism. The name Shimon, in Japanese, directly translates to something like "Determined Scholar."
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.
Very excited to live in a timeline where autoimmune diseases could be cured. 40 people are already in remission from Lupus in a trial conducted last year.
It’s interesting that two of the two American recipients weren’t recognized by other awards like membership in the National Academy of Sciences or the National Academy of Medicine. Truly black horse candidates which makes this fun.
Tolerance is one of the coolest things in immunology.
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.
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?
In the past here on HN, someone spoke of a set of books that were an incredible resource on the body’s immune response. Does anyone know which books those were? I’m assuming they will get an update to include info on T-reg.
These discoveries are old enough to be in the textbooks already.
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.
I don’t know the post you’re referring to but I highly recommend How the Immune System Works by Lauren Sompayrac. It explains the interesting parts without getting bogged down in the details of every signalling pathway, but without dumbing things down too much.
I'd use Abbas' Immunology as a standard textbook and Sompayrac's How The Immune System Works as a more straightforward, lean book on the immune system.
> 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.
dangle1|4 months ago
>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...
pdxandi|4 months ago
tombert|4 months ago
tverbeure|4 months ago
He’ll be in for a surprise when he switches his phone back on.
matsemann|4 months ago
NeutralForest|4 months ago
A_D_E_P_T|4 months ago
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.
coef2|4 months ago
unknown|4 months ago
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jelsisi|4 months ago
osnium123|4 months ago
pazimzadeh|4 months ago
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.
TOMDM|4 months ago
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?
slider22|4 months ago
blackbear_|4 months ago
fabian2k|4 months ago
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.
jsenn|4 months ago
davikr|4 months ago
smath|4 months ago
haunter|4 months ago
Tuesday: physics. Wednesday: chemistry. Thursday: literature. Friday: peace. Monday: economics.
tombert|4 months ago
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.
Keyframe|4 months ago
mongol|4 months ago
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utbabya|4 months ago
globalhsbc|4 months ago
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thruhfjrhr|4 months ago
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thruhfjrhr|4 months ago
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thruhfjrhr|4 months ago
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marcelotournier|4 months ago
Man frantically shakes whole body, then raises dramatically his fist and screams: - FOX...
astrange|4 months ago
But:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_hedgehog_protein#Former_...
aspenmayer|4 months ago
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.