The 2018 Nobel science prizes

EARLY October is a nerve-racking period for the world’s top scientists. Though few will admit it, many who have done important work hope at this time of the year for a phone call, often in the middle of the night, that will tell them they are invited to an early Yuletide celebration in Stockholm. There are other, more lucrative, prizes around, and the trio of physics, chemistry and physiology or medicine that Alfred Nobel outlined in his will as suitable scientific subjects for reward is thought by some to be out of date. But the prestige of being a Nobel laureate remains undiminished.This time around the physiology prize went to James Allison of the University of Texas and Tasuku Honjo of Kyoto University, in Japan, “for their discovery of cancer therapy by inhibition of negative immune regulation”. The fact that remissions from apparently terminal cancer, though rare, do happen from time to time had long led some to dream that it might be possible to harness the body’s immune system to attack malignancies. The immune system is a network of cells which defends against parasites and pathogens. Yet decades of effort to encourage it to assault cancer effectively as well, an idea called immunotherapy, led to nothing. These many failures had, by the 1990s, caused most people and firms to abandon the field.