Nobel winner dies three days before prize announcement

This year’s Nobel prize in physiology or medicine has been won by three researchers whose work offers insights into the activation and regulation of the immune system. Announcing its decision in Stockholm on 2 October, the awards committee said that the work had opened the way to developing new methods for preventing and treating disease.

The three winners are Bruce Beutler, a professor of genetics and immunology at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California; Jules Hoffmann, who worked at the University of Strasbourg until 2009; and Ralph Steinman, director of Rockefeller University’s Center for Immunology and Immune Diseases in New York.

Unbeknown to the Nobel Assembly, Dr Steinman had died …