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Nobel prize for medicine given to three biologists for work on immune system, but one of them died just days ago The Nobel prize season began under a dark cloud on Monday when it emerged that one of the winners of the freshly minted medicine award had passed away days before. The world’s most prestigious prizes honour scientists and other leading figures for exceptional contributions to their fields, but the prize rules state that they cannot be awarded posthumously. Officials at the Nobel assembly will meet over the next few days to decide whether the prize stands or needs to be amended. This year’s prize for medicine was given to three biologists whose work on the immune system opened up new avenues in the fight against infections and diseases . American Bruce Beutler , 53, and French biologist Jules Hoffmann , 70, share half of the 10 million Swedish kronor (£934,000) prize money, with the remainder earmarked for the 68-year-old Canadian-born Ralph Steinman . But when the Nobel committee tried on Monday to contact Dr Steinman, a researcher at Rockefeller University in New York, they heard that he had died from pancreatic cancer on Friday. Steinman had been treating himself with a therapy based on his own research into the body’s immune system, but died after a four-year battle with the disease. Göran Hansson, secretary general of the Nobel committee , told the Guardian: “We never inform the winners in advance. I couldn’t get through to Dr Steinman for obvious reasons, so I sent an email that was picked up by his daughter who contacted the president of Rockefeller University. He then contacted us with the news.” Hansson said it was too early to speculate on whether Steinman’s part of the prize would stand. Since 1974, a Nobel prize can only be handed out posthumously if the recipient dies between the award being announced and the traditional ceremony in December. “We expect to take a decision on this with the Nobel Foundation within the next few days. Right now our thoughts go to Dr Steinman’s family and collaborators. We are shocked by the sadness,” Hansson said. The Nobel assembly regularly takes decades to recognise achievements worthy of the prize and many winners are retired by the time they receive the honour. But Hansson said this appeared to be the first time since the rules were updated in 1974 that the prize had been awarded to someone who was deceased. “This is a unique situation we are facing,” he said. Prior to 1974, a person could be awarded a prize posthumously if they had already been nominated before February of the same year. This was the case for Erik Axel Karlfeldt, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1931, and Dag Hammarskjöld, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1961. In a statement released on Monday , Marc Tessier-Lavigne, president of Rockefeller University, said the university was “delighted” that the Nobel Foundation had recognised Steinman’s “seminal discoveries” concerning the body’s immune system. “But the news is bittersweet, as we also learned this morning from Ralph’s family that he passed a few days ago after a long battle with cancer. Our thoughts are with Ralph’s wife, children and family,” the statement said. Steinman’s daughter, Alexis, added: “We are all so touched that our father’s many years of hard work are being recognised with a Nobel Prize. He devoted his life to his work and his family, and he would be truly honoured.” The president of the Royal Society, Sir Paul Nurse – himself a Nobel laureate – said: “This is a great tragedy. Ralph Steinman’s work was ahead of its time and he waited too long for the Nobel prize. To die just days before its announcement is almost too much to bear. He will be remembered as one of the great immunologists of our time.” The award panel at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute in Stockholm praised the researchers for work that “revolutionised our understanding of the immune system by discovering key principles for its activation”. The announcement marked the start of more than a week of Nobel awards, with prizes for physics and chemistry due on Tuesday and Wednesday. The prizes for literature, peace and economics follow on Thursday, Friday and next Monday respectively. Decades of meticulous laboratory work led the three scientists to piece together how humans and animals defend themselves against potentially lethal bacteria and other microbes. Beutler, who is head of genetics at the Scripps Research Institute in California, and Hoffmann, director of research at the French national centre for scientific research (CNRS), discovered one of the body’s first lines of defence, where the immune system senses and destroys bacteria, fungi and viruses, and initiates inflammation to block their attacks. Steinman’s work in 1973 shed light on the immune system’s second line of defence, where sentinel “dendritic” cells direct the body’s killer T cells to attack foreign organisms. For many years, his work was dismissed as flawed by the wider scientific community. Before news of Steinman’s death emerged, Lars Klareskog, who chairs the prize-giving Nobel Assembly, said of the trio’s work: “I think that we will have new, better vaccines against microbes and that is very much needed now with the increased resistance against antibiotics.” Their discoveries are expected to lead to other treatments that combat cancer and “autoimmune” diseases, where the immune system becomes faulty and attacks healthy tissues in the body. One hope is for vaccines that marshall the immune system to fight tumours. The first such therapeutic cancer vaccine, Provenge, was approved for use in the US last year. In an interview with Bloomberg News, Beutler said: it was “incredible” to win a Nobel prize with Hoffman and Steinman: “My idea right from the beginning, I guess, was to dismantle the immune system one gene at a time so we could track the mutations that cause problems. “I woke up in the middle of the night, and glanced at my cellphone, and the first thing I saw was a message line that just said the words ‘Nobel Prize’. Needless to say, I grabbed it and started looking at the messages. Wow.” Nobel prizes Science prizes People in science Ian Sample guardian.co.uk