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.
At least in Physics, on average every year there is more than one discovery that is worth a Nobel prize. So there is an increasing backlog of people who should get a Nobel prize. You can look at the list and check that people in the 1920s got their prize about 15 years after their work [1]. But recently people have been getting it about 30-40 years after.
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?
I've never thought or heard of that, but theoretically yes?
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.
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.
Blame Alfred Nobel, he set up the original categories. According to Wikipedia his goals were prizes "which annually recognize those who 'conferred the greatest benefit to humankind'". Perhaps he didn't consider math as directly benefiting mankind.
> 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.
Readit News
>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.
Deleted Comment
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.
Dead Comment