Ralph Steinman

Ralph Steinman, who died on September 30 aged 68, shared this year’s Nobel Prize for Medicine for his work on understanding how the human body’s immune system responds to infection.

Ralph Steinman 

A Canadian-born biologist, he discovered and named the system’s dendritic cells, and showed how science could harness their power to fight infections and other diseases. But the Nobel Prize committee’s announcement was soon tinged with both sadness and controversy when it emerged that Steinman had died just before the award was made public.

Nobel rules do not allow the prize to be awarded posthumously unless the announcement is made before a person’s death. But given that the mistake was made in good faith (Steinman, who had cancer, was contacted last week, only for his condition to deteriorate rapidly), it has been decided that the award will stand.

As a result Steinman, who was director of the Laboratory of Cellular Physiology and Immunology at Rockefeller University and a senior physician at the Rockefeller University Hospital, has posthumously been awarded half the prize (about £470,000), with the other half being divided between the two other winners.

Although Steinman and his mentor, Zanvil Cohn, discovered dendritic cells in 1972, it was another six years before the cells’ role in initiating the immune response was more fully understood; and nearly another 20 years before it was generally accepted in wider scientific circles. For much of that time, according to his colleague Ira Mellman, Steinman’s dendritic cell theory was met with “downright nasty hostility”.

This was partly because other scientists, lacking his expertise in the culture of dendritic cells, were unable to reproduce Steinman’s results. Only when developments in tissue culture methods yielded cells in larger numbers did others agree with Steinman that the cells were the primers of the immune system.

“He didn’t care how many people thought it was wrong,” Mellman said, “but until he’d either proved it or found that he was wrong, he would not stop.”
Recent research has also linked dendritic cells to the process of silencing, or tolerance, whereby the immune system learns to ignore its own cells and attack only foreign cells. Steinman believed that such powers offered new insight into auto-immune disorders, and today the therapeutic properties of dendritic cells are being investigated in clinical trials for cancer therapy and early-stage trials of a vaccine for Aids.
Ralph Marvin Steinman was born on January 14 1943 at Sherbrooke, Quebec. He won a scholarship to study Science at McGill University in Montreal, graduating in 1963, and earned another degree from Harvard Medical School five years later, also on a scholarship.
After an internship and residency at Massachusetts General Hospital, he joined Rockefeller University in 1970 as a postdoctoral fellow in the Laboratory of Cellular Physiology and Immunology. Working with Cohn, he began research on the primary white cells of the immune system which in various ways identify, arrest and destroy infectious micro-organisms and tumour cells.
Later he researched the role of dendritic cells in the onset of several immune responses, including graft rejection, resistance to tumours, autoimmune diseases and infections, including Aids. He and Cohn coined the term dendritic using the Greek root “dendron” (tree), a reference to the cells’ branch-like projections.
Diagnosed with pancreatic cancer four years ago, Steinman extended his own lifespan by undergoing treatment using a dendritic cell-based immunotherapy based on his own research. But he was unable to prolong his life sufficiently to learn that he had been awarded the Nobel Prize. Indeed, his family discovered he had received the award only when they checked his mobile telephone to find a message from the Nobel committee.
Before his illness, Ralph Steinman enjoyed ballroom dancing with his wife, Claudia. She survives him with their twin daughters and son, as well as his 92-year-old mother.