Albert Lasker Award
for Basic Medical Research

Acceptance Remarks by Ralph Steinman

It is exhilarating to be recognized for a Lasker award and to listen to Joe Goldstein's exceptional summary. I am so excited that I am actually feeling dendritic, wanting to embrace the members of the jury and all my friends and family who are here today.

I became interested in immunology late in medical school, inspired by leaders like MacFarlane Burnet, Peter Medawar and Zanvil Cohn. I wanted to know how immunity begins, a basic problem so little understood yet so relevant to many diseases. This question led to the discovery of dendritic cells and to a commitment to figure out how these cells work.

Of course, scientists are always focused on the future, and now I realize that to move forward, we need more people like Mary Lasker and Tony Fauci. One reason that I say this is because we need to mobilize support for the kind of research in patients that leads to discovery. The patient often sets the standard for what we still need to know. Let me sketch three examples where research in patients on dendritic cells should make a difference.

In arthritis, studies in patients showed that cytokines like tumor necrosis factor kindle the disease. Dendritic cells are a major source of these cytokines. But why? Research in patients should figure this out and lead to precise and long lasting treatments of inflammatory diseases.

Think about the miraculous vaccines that prevent smallpox, polio, and measles. But why do we still lack vaccines to resist AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis? Real answers, I feel, will be to discover the principles in humans that allow dendritic cells to bring about vaccine immunity.

Consider the progress in cancer to identify the genetic and subsequent changes that drive malignancy. Again, dendritic cells and the immune system provide a distinct and potentially powerful route to therapies that recognize and attack the changes in cancer cells.

Therefore we need research in humans to address major scientific frontiers. However, there is currently a lack of patient-based research at many major meetings and journals in experimental medicine. This indicates that support for basic patient-based investigation needs to be built, hence the need for more Mary Laskers and Toni Faucis.

Thank you again to the jury for this exciting honor, thanks for the help I have received from many quarters cited in the acknowledgements at your tables, and thanks to the scientific community and its supporters for the exceptional privilege to be a scientist.