2011 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

The 2011 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to Bruce A. Beutler, Jules A. Hoffmann and Ralph M. Steinman. The prize was announced by the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm on 3 October 2011.

The citation

Half of the prize goes jointly to Bruce A. Beutler and Jules A. Hoffmann "for their discoveries concerning the activation of innate immunity". Half of the prize goes to Ralph M. Steinman "for his discovery of the dendritic cell and its role in adaptive immunity".

The laureates

Bruce A. Beutler was born in 1957 in Chicago, the United States, and is affiliated with the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, Dallas and The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla. Jules A. Hoffmann was born in 1941 in Echternach, Luxembourg, and is affiliated with the University of Strasbourg, Strasbourg. Ralph M. Steinman was born in 1943 in Montreal, Canada.

Why it matters

Their discoveries explain how the body first detects infection and then mounts a targeted response. Steinman died of cancer three days before the announcement; the Nobel Foundation decided that the award would stand, as the committee had not known.

The prize

The prize is worth 10 million Swedish kronor, divided between the laureates. It will be presented at a ceremony in Stockholm on 10 December, the anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite whose will founded the prizes in 1895.