科技英语新闻:Canada's Nobel Prize laureate Steinman praised by colleagues

OTTAWA, Oct. 3 (Xinhua) -- Many friends and colleagues of Canadian scientist Ralph Steinman reacted with shock when they learned on Monday that Steinman won the Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology three days after he died.

Since 1974, Nobel Prizes are no longer awarded posthumously, but the Nobel Prize committee said that it had made its choice before Steinman's death.

Many of Steinman's friends and colleagues said that they learned of Steinman's death at the same time that they learned of his Nobel Prize, which was awarded for a discovery Steinman made in 1973.

Steinman, 68, discovered dendritic cells, which help regulate adaptive immunity, which purges invading microorganisms from the body. Dendritic cells activate T cells, which "remember" the DNA sequence of invading organisms and protect the body from later infections from the same disease.

"Their work has opened up new avenues for the development of prevention and therapy against infections, cancer and inflammatory disease," the citation said.

Monday, the Nobel Committee defended its decision to award the prize to Steinman. "The decision to award the Nobel Prize to Ralph Steinman was made in good faith, based on the assumption that the Nobel Laureate was alive," the foundation said in a statement.

"The Nobel Foundation thus believes that what has occurred is more reminiscent of the example in the statutes concerning a person who has been named as a Nobel Laureate and has died before the actual Nobel Prize Award Ceremony."

It is still unclear who will pick up Steinman's prize at the award ceremony later this year.

Steinman, a cell biologist at Rockefeller University in New York City, died of pancreatic cancer on Friday. For more than four years, he had used his own immune therapy discoveries to extend his life.

"The news is bittersweet, as we also learned this morning from Ralph's family that he passed a few days ago," Rockefeller University President Marc Tessier-Lavigne said in a statement.

"We are all so touched that our father's many years of hard work are being recognized with a Nobel Prize," Steinman's daughter, Alexis, said in the statement. "He devoted his life to his work and his family, and he would be truly honored."

Steinman's heirs will share the 1.5-million U.S. dollar prize with American genetics professor Bruce Beutler and French scientist Jules Hoffmann.

Dr. Beutler is professor of genetics and immunology at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. Dr. Hoffmann headed a research laboratory in Strasbourg, France, between 1974 and 2009 and served as president of the French National Academy of Sciences between 2007 and 2008.

"Ralph worked right up until last week," said Michel Nussenzweig, a collaborator of Steinman's at Rockefeller University. "His dream was to use his discovery to cure cancer and infectious diseases like HIV and tuberculosis. It's a dream that's pretty close."

Steinman was born in 1943 in Montreal, Canada's second largest city, and studied chemistry and biology at McGill University in his hometown before receiving an MD from Harvard Medical School in Boston in 1968. He joined Rockefeller University in 1970 as a postdoctoral fellow.

"He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer four years ago, and his life was extended using a dendritic-cell based immunotherapy of his own design," the university said in a statement.

In a statement, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper lauded the three winners of the Nobel for medicine and called the award " a fitting final tribute" to Steinman's life's work.

"Dr. Steinman shall be honored for all time with this achievement," Harper said. "Canadians will mourn his loss."