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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.’”
https://www.oregonlive.com/pacific-northwest-news/2025/10/sc...
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.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_in_Phy...
Highs had a delay of 49 years from paper to prize, though he got the prize the year after his theory was experimentally confirmed.
Yes, many Nobel prizes are awarded for work that was completed decades ago in part to ensure that the work passes the test of time.
Meanwhile, Fred Ramsdell probably still doesn’t know he’s won it because he’s backpacking in Idaho.
He’ll be in for a surprise when he switches his phone back on.
That's Idaho, USA for anyone who lives in one of the 194 other countries in the world (yes we do exist!)
According to Gemini, the place name Idaho is unique to the USA.
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I love how Nobel Prize always have a "popular information" with nice layman description of what was discovered and why it was important. From the sidebar: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2025/popular-info...
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.
There are actually three
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...
And then later on there's of course the recipient's Nobel lecture, most of which are fantastic.
Indeed!
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.
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.
His name could be interpreted as "aspiring to be a scholar". I guess he's done an exceptional job living up to it.
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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.
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.
This is fascinating.
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?
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.
As a general introduction I quite like this one: https://shop-us.kurzgesagt.org/products/immune-a-journey-int...
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.
Janeway's Immunobiology is the classic textbook
Here's the 8th edition (2012):
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/dx0egzl37bfsl9ur6zsg1/janeway...
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.
“How the immune system works”, Lauren Sompayrac
Ah it's the Nobel Prize week! If anyone curious about this week's schedule:
Tuesday: physics. Wednesday: chemistry. Thursday: literature. Friday: peace. Monday: economics.
It still kind of baffles me that there’s no Nobel prize for mathematics.
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.
They can always do what economics did and create a new prize and name it in honor of Alfred Nobel
obligatory comment about how economics one isn't a Nobel prize.
Next Monday also isn’t in this week so it all works out.
I think it's more the Nobel Peace Prize that stands out.
The peace prize stands out for being different.
The economics one stands out for not being endowed by Nobel but instead Sveriges Riksbank well after his death (thus it's the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences).
But it's administered by the Nobel Foundation, etc.
The Peace Prize stands out because sometimes it is given to someone who wages war such as Henry Kissinger or Barack Obama.
Giving the prize to Obama, whose main achievement at the time was not to be Bush, was a disgrace and did huge damage to the image of the committee. And he did nothing after that that would have deserved a prize.
Bush's PEPFAR was so good that if they gave him the prize it'd be more deserved than many other people who have it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Memorial_Prize_in_Econom...
> 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.
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The best take I saw was giving it to USAID
No. Francesca Albanese and Greta Thunberg.
Is it seven or eight wars he ended this term? I imagine if he could just remember at least two then he’d be a favorite for the prize.
He's starting wars in Portland, Los Angeles, and Chicago. Trump told the military last week, "This is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room. That's a war too. It's a war from within."
Was there ever a clear exception stating that you're ineligible for a Nobel in regards to stopping a war that you yourself started?
The Peace Prize has had quite a few weird choices, like Kissinger when that simply meant the USA would stop participating in the Vietnamese civil war (and to be generous putting a stop to USA bombing campaigns that Kissinger advocated in Vietnam and surrounding countries) or Barack Obama for giving a few speeches after less than a year in office. So it's not out of the question but it's hard to see the logic behind Trump getting one now.
Here are the current favorites accross the betting sites, I mean Trump has a decent chance
https://files.catbox.moe/xc1ik1.png
(NATO is a funny one too lol)
Betting sites set their odds to maximise their revenue, not reality ;)
Polymarkets currently has him at 3%
https://polymarket.com/event/nobel-peace-prize-winner-2025?t...
On the one hand, betting markets are fantastic predictors. I do really admire the "skin in the game" aspect tracking future outcomes better than polling or "expert" opinion.
But that comes at a steep cost. It's a huge negative externality. Placing bets on future outcomes like this isn't the same as placing bets on future outcomes by starting companies, investing in companies, doing fundamental research, or even putting your money in the public markets.
It's like sports betting. We're making the marketplace rich and separating gambling addicts from their livelihoods. Without enriching society.
We should tax this to pay for education or have some kind of societal upside. It's all bad, otherwise.
We may get some surprises but I don't think so:
- Trump doesn't project a peaceful image, that's not his style, unlike Obama. No matter the result of his actions, he is at a disadvantage.
- The September peace proposal for the Gaza war that could make a good argument is likely to be too recent to influence the decision.
- Trump wants to annex Greenland, I don't think the Norwegian Nobel Committee appreciates.
files.catbox.moe has a security policy called HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS), which means that Firefox can only connect to it securely. You can’t add an exception to visit this site.
Why is Firefix blocking it? Is HSTS somehow bad?
Oh there's something with their certificate
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holy fuck people will bet on pretty much anything I guess huh?
I bet you they won't.
I will take that bet. It's very easy for me to win.
Yes it is sad that the whole Nobel prize coverage will be just a background to a week talking about Trump, whether he wins or not :(
He won't win. How could the committee look at him, while he is actively celebrating killing people off the coast of Venezuela (whether they are smuggling drugs or not) and give him the Peace Prize.
Obama authorized 54 strikes in Pakistan in his first year, resulting in estimated 100 civilians dead. He received Nobel peace prize that year.
I guess it depends on whether or not the committee members plan on visiting the US anytime soon.
Trump isn't good enough at blackmail. Netanyahu, on the other hand...
I don't think anyone seriously believes he will win. Despite making up all kind of wars and conflicts he claims to have solved, there hasn't been any real peace coming from him, yet. Maybe Gaza turns out to something real, but it's not done yet, and I kinda doubt they decide on these prices on a short whim. And if development in the USA continues like at the moment, I doubt he will be considered next year. It will be just one conflict cancelling out one peace.
> anyone seriously believes
The brain donors at NPR Morning Edition, the mission of which is to remind me daily to never donate to NPR, spent some airtime this morning discussing Gaza peace talks and how they are motivated by and leading to a Trump Nobel.
but what if he turns into the ultimate humanitarian after he wins one? Has the nobel committee considered that?/s
Yeah its weird how he explicitly states he wants a peace prize and then turns around and does very hellish things, rips up Aid programs, impose one sided tariffs without caring about your allies, belittle a president desperately trying to fight for his countries sovereignty, mafia style negotiations for said country minerals without a security guarantee in order to send weapons, trash nato allies repeatedly, taunt allies that you wont honor security guarantees if they dont do x , remove historical names for no good reason from various government objects , alienate out entire class of people with your rhetoric while using a platform thats supposed to be bipartisan, deport & arrest people while bypassing judges as much as you can
> rips up Aid programs
This is a misleading miscapitalisation. USAID isn't about aid. It's about "international development" - i.e. soft power in ideologically contested nations.
>but what if he turns into the ultimate humanitarian after he wins one? Has the nobel committee considered that?/s
Ugh giving me flashbacks to the “the office will change him” arguments. Can’t believe people actually said that out loud.
If he somehow got the peace prize as he balloons a department sneaking around in plain clothes with their faces covered rounding people up at work and terrifying/ripping families apart then the prize is truly a joke. Luckily there’s no way he’s getting it.
Oh well, the comments will also be filled with complaints about Kissinger, Obama, Teresa, Arafat... and how the prize therefore somehow is worthless. 2020 thread has 30 comments mentioning Trump, 20 comments mentioning Obama.. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24728142
Instead of celebrating the winners, some people just want to complain.
Both are valid topics.
Sure, but is it worth discussing again and again and again? To me it's like beating a dead horse. Every year, the same discussion here. Drowns the more interesting discussion about the actual winners.
I get your point.
It is possible, however, that it's different people each year having roughly the same conversation.
But this is true of many topics.
Talking about Trump is also like beating a dead horse to some people. Doesn't really matter. People are allowed to talk about stuff.
Dead horses don’t generally beat themselves, after all; hobby horses doubly so.
> Instead of celebrating the winners
Well.. assuming the winner isn't a war criminal we can celebrate at least :P
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First pattern that comes into mind after reading about a gene called "Foxp3" and immune targets:
Man frantically shakes whole body, then raises dramatically his fist and screams: - FOX...
Metal Gear..?
https://breezewiki.com/metalgear/wiki/FOXDIE
> FOXDIE (originally rendered as FoxDie) was an engineered retrovirus developed by the DIA for the Pentagon. It was programmed to kill specific people by recognizing a person's DNA, causing cardiac arrest.
Crafted by Rajat
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