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Winner of the Nobel prize for medicine had passed away but rules state that award cannot be given posthumously The Nobel prize season began under a cloud 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. Following an emergency meeting of officials at the Nobel assembly, it was decided that, in this instance, the rules could be ignored. The Nobel foundation concluded that the award should stand, saying: “The Nobel prize to Ralph Steinman was made in good faith, based on the assumption that the Nobel laureate was alive.” 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 Steinman. But when the Nobel committee tried to contact Dr Steinman, a researcher at Rockefeller University in New York, they heard 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.” Since 1974, a Nobel prize could only be awarded posthumously if the recipient died between the award being announced and the traditional ceremony in December. 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. That 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 on Monday, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, president of Rockefeller University, said the university was “delighted” 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,” 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”. Beutler, head of genetics at the Scripps Research Institute in California, and Hoffmann, director of research at the French national centre for scientific research, 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. In an interview with Bloomberg News, Beutler said: “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 Ian Sample guardian.co.uk