Ralph Steinman

Origins and early life

Ralph Marvin Steinman was born in Montreal on 14 January 1943, the second of four children of Irving Steinman, a Jewish immigrant from Eastern Europe, and of his wife Nettie, and grew up in Sherbrooke, where his parents kept a clothing store. His father hoped he would join the business, but in high school he turned to science, took an honours degree at McGill University in 1963 and his medical degree at Harvard in 1968.

Work and career

A year with Elizabeth Hay at Harvard drew him to the immune system, and in 1970 he joined Rockefeller University in New York, in the laboratory of Zanvil Cohn and James Hirsch, where he spent the rest of his career. In 1973, with Cohn, he discovered a previously unknown class of immune cells that constantly put out and drew back long processes, and named them dendritic cells. In cell cultures he showed that they set off vivid responses in T cells, the cells of adaptive immunity, and though this long met with scepticism, his laboratory showed that dendritic cells are the sentinels that start the immune response.

He trained more than a hundred young scientists, received the Lasker basic research award in 2007 and in 2010 began the first trial of an HIV vaccine aimed at dendritic cells. Diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in March 2007, he designed dendritic-cell treatments for himself with his collaborators and kept working for four and a half years.

Later years

He died in New York on 30 September 2011, three days before the Nobel Assembly, unaware of his death, awarded him half of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discovery of the dendritic cell and its role in adaptive immunity, the other half going to Bruce Beutler and Jules Hoffmann. The award was allowed to stand, an unprecedented decision, and his family gave the whole prize to charity, notably to a Rockefeller professorship named for Cohn and Steinman and to a foundation for young scientists.