Image: Illustration by Roberto Parada
In Brief
- Ralph M. Steinman was the first person to describe dendritic cells, which play a key role in initiating immune responses. He named them for their treelike limbs.
- Dendritic cells, which “teach” other immune cells what to attack, now make up the core of many experimental vaccines against cancer and HIV.
- When Steinman was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2007, he and a network of colleagues turned to these new vaccines to treat his disease.
- His colleagues believe the vaccines helped to extend his life well beyond the norm. He died just three days before winning the Nobel Prize.
More In This Article
Peering through a microscope at a plate of cells one day, Ralph M. Steinman spied something no one had ever seen before. It was the early 1970s, and he was a researcher at the Rockefeller University on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. At the time, scientists were still piecing together the basic building blocks of the immune system. They had figured out that there are B cells, white blood cells that help to identify foreign invaders, and T cells, another type of white blood cell that attacks those invaders. What puzzled them, however, was what triggered those T cells and B cells to go to work in the first place. Steinman glimpsed what he thought might be the missing piece: strange, spindly-armed cells unlike any he had ever noticed.
His intuition turned out to be correct. These dendritic cells, as Steinman named them, are now thought to play a crucial role in detecting invaders in the body and initiating an immune response against them. They snag interlopers with their arms, ingest them and carry them back to other types of immune cells—in effect, “teaching” them what to attack. It was a landmark discovery that explained in unprecedented detail how vaccines worked, and it propelled Steinman into the top tiers of his profession.
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Add CommentCells within cells, within cells, within cells, within cells, within-------
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMagee and Cancer
I am led to believe, from experiments, that the influential orbital speed of Magee’s nuclei is a bit slower than the orbital nuclei of our body cells. A cancer cell is a cell that has its orbiting nuclei sped up to the point where this cell is forced to divide within healthy, packed cells. I can say that using Magee will stabilize and slow nuclei orbital speeds of both healthy and cancerous cells. In just a few hours the body has these treated cells back to normal body cell speed (re: Burn and Cure).
I suspect that whatever is causing this nucleus abnormality is still present so a Magee treatment plan would be established.
A cancerous cell is a cell and it too requires nourishment. These fast orbit nuclei feed on faster food than that which normal cells of the body feed on. The cause of cancer is its food; there comes a time where these dividing cancer cells run short of nourishment and desperately look for another fast food source. This source is body fat. The big problem is that the orbit speed of fat is again faster, promoting expeditious cell division.
Forces of equal evolution act upon forces of equal evolution and by administering poison (chemotherapy) the orbit nuclei speed is slowed, hampering cell division. Chemo also affects healthy cells causing nutrition to now be a predator, creating a new disease.
Once a cancer cell starts feeding on body fat the orbit nuclei speed is increased enough to affect the orbital nuclei speed of a healthy cell making that healthy cell a cancer cell! At this stage the body is robbed of its fat and fat being the body’s safety from fast nutrition, fast nutrition is now predator not prey, and kills the body. For you to properly understand this paper you will need to know my science.
cbc.ca bruce voigt