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.
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.
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.
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.
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.’”
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.
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.
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[ 6.2 ms ] story [ 40.8 ms ] threadIt'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.
Tuesday: physics. Wednesday: chemistry. Thursday: literature. Friday: peace. Monday: economics.
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.
Man frantically shakes whole body, then raises dramatically his fist and screams: - FOX...
>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...
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.