No, it’s not Steve Jobs, and, although he had a much greater contribution to the development of human science, he is likely to remain less known than the head of Apple. It is one of the winners of the Nobel Prize for Medicine, Dr. Ralph Steinman, a man who had a personal battle with pancreatic cancer.
Steinman was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work on immune system. What nobody knows is that the last part of his life he became a guinea pig for treatments that have not yet been approved by authorities in an attempt to get rid of cancer. Nobel Prize winner died just three days before the announcement of the foundation on Monday. Nobel Prize is not given posthumously. Karolinska Institute decided however to award it to him, arguing that when the award decision was made, the Commission did not know that Steinman had died.
Friends and colleagues said that Steinman has devoted his life to research in the hope that this will make a difference in people’s lives. This commitment has become even more manifest when he found that he had pancreatic cancer. And precisely because he knew he had to die, “he shared the need to speed up the research – a need that cancer patients feel – to find effective new treatments”, said Louis Weiner, director of Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Center Cancer in Washington.
“He didn’t want to be held hostage to the concepts that have failed, small obstacles that are put into the development of effective therapies. He wanted to see effective treatments available to people who can be helped”. By the last day of his life he fought trying to find a treatment and was subjected to drugs and operations, both conventional and unconventional. Steinman lived four years and a half after learning the diagnosis: stage four of pancreatic cancer. Normally, this disease would have killed him in one year.
His colleagues told Reuters that it is impossible to know what extended his life. If it were the operations which has undergone, chemotherapy or experimental treatments. In his last conversation with Schlesinger, one day before being admitted to hospital, he talked about the most recent test results for an HIV vaccine treatment. A week later, he died. On Google, the search term “Steve Jobs” returns 74.8 million results. Search term “Ralph Steinman” returns 6.8 million results.
Pancreatic cancer is fatal. It is the fourth most deadly disease. Steve Jobs has lived more than seven years after being diagnosed with a less serious cancer, which evolves more slowly. Steinman cancer that killed him a week ago was the same type as the one that killed actor Patrick Swayze two years ago.