Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2025 | Hacker News Reader

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2025

nobelprize.org

348 pointslode79 comments

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.

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.

Highs had a delay of 49 years from paper to prize, though he got the prize the year after his theory was experimentally confirmed.

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...

They got Nobel prize because they made most important discovery than all other living scientists.

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.

There's also Idaho, Ohio, USA, home to one of the jankiest looking post offices I've ever seen. It looks like a dilapidated outhouse.

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...

Indeed!

And then later on there's of course the recipient's Nobel lecture, most of which are fantastic.

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.

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.

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?

I've never thought or heard of that, but theoretically yes?

However most of this happens before birth, and thymus infection is pretty unlikely at that point - the baby is protected by the mom's antibodies and is also physically sequestered. If the unborn baby has a thymus infection I would be more worried about what the mother has.

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.

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.

As a general introduction I quite like this one: https://shop-us.kurzgesagt.org/products/immune-a-journey-int...

“How the immune system works”, Lauren Sompayrac

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.

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.

obligatory comment about how economics one isn't a Nobel prize.

Next Monday also isn’t in this week so it all works out.

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.

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.

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

Blame Alfred Nobel, he set up the original categories. According to Wikipedia his goals were prizes "which annually recognize those who 'conferred the greatest benefit to humankind'". Perhaps he didn't consider math as directly benefiting mankind.

I know, I just find it odd that apparently literature directly benefits mankind but not math.

Am I the only one who see the title immune system suppression and think weapon?

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_hedgehog_protein

But:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_hedgehog_protein#Former_...

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