Most people don’t really like science. To the average person, the word science conjures up memories of test tubes, beakers, memorization, and the Periodic table. Oh, those were good times! I know, all you cared about was remembering that stuff until the midterm and then you’d cast it all away into the garbage bin of your mind. It won’t be on the final, will it?

Well, science is much more than that and much more exciting, and intriguing, and demanding, and rewarding. What you learned in high school science class is equivalent to learning how to hold a racquet in tennis. What we’re going to talk about today is equivalent to the Wimbledon final. No comparison, but much more important to your life than any tennis match, even Wimbledon (and that’s very hard for me to say). I am going to do my best to keep your interest and make this informative, quick, and relatively painless.

The 2025 Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded to 3 scientists (Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell, and Simon Sakaguchi) who solved a decades-old mystery about how the immune system restrains the cell-mediated response through a specific type of T cell called Tregs. You see, the immune world has always wondered why our T cells attacked foreign bodies and invaders but did not attack our own healthy tissues (immune tolerance), except in the case of autoimmune diseases. Scientists knew that the thymus developed some T cells that would attack the host’s own tissues, but that these “self-reactive” T cells were somehow controlled by “suppressor cells”, but no one could prove that theory through experimentation. Then, in 1995, Dr. Sakaguchi identified a population of regulatory T cells (Tregs) whose only purpose was to regulate autoimmune manifestations of T cells. Drs. Brunkow and Ramsdell’s research focused on the genetic component of immune tolerance and discovered that the human gene, FOXP3, is essential for Treg development. All of this research was then elegantly presented to the scientific community in a series of 3 papers published in the peer-reviewed literature in 2003.

Their discoveries of the role of Tregs led to a fundamental shift in our understanding of immune-mediated diseases and treatments. Up until the identification of the role of Tregs, autoimmune diseases and transplant rejection were managed using steroids, cytotoxic drugs, and biologics aimed at nonspecific immunosuppression. In other words, treatment for these important illnesses was aimed at the entire immune system, instead of at the cellular level. Science now knows that many autoimmune diseases, such as lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, and others are characterized by defective Treg numbers or function.

The world of medicine has now taken the discoveries of our 3 Nobel winners and applied the pharmacologic activity of Tregs in the emerging field of tolerance medicine. Approaches such as isolating, enhancing, and then reinfusing a patient’s Tregs or augmentation of Tregs within the patient’s body have entered early clinical trials in the fields of autoimmunity, organ transplantation, and the prevention of graft-versus-host disease. Beyond even the field of immune-related health, the role of Tregs in the body’s inflammatory process has initiated research in the fields of cardiovascular and metabolic disease, muscular dystrophy, pregnancy, obesity, neurodegenerative disease, and aging.

Three decades after these discoveries were published, the findings of these 3 Nobel laureates are fundamentally altering medical care and therapeutic approaches to a wide range of important health outcomes. The results of their research formed the basis for further research around the world that resulted in important improvements in the lives of mankind. And they are nowhere near finished.

That’s science. All of that work is what is so beautiful about the world of science. Look at where we now stand because of the inquisitive nature and intellectual brilliance of Dr. Sakaguchi, working in a lab in Nagoya, Japan on an idea he had about this particular type of Tcells. Amazing. I have said for years that I don’t know of any family that has not been touched in some way by autoimmune disease. I know mine has. Their prevalence seems to be everywhere. The work of all of these scientists begins to give us an answer on a way to successfully combat autoimmune disease, transplantation rejection, and, possibly, a host of inflammatory-related illnesses.

How can you not love this stuff? Who cares about your dusty old beakers in 10th grade? This is what science really is and this is just one small aspect of one field, medicine. I’m certain that mind-blowing advances are coming to light in all of the other disciplines. All the more reason that cutting science funding is so foolish. It is impossible to even know what we may be giving up by cutting NIH and University funding across the board, particularly for “anti-intellectual” and “anti-science” reasons. If those can even be considered reasons.

Anyway, it’s the Holiday Season and I’m not going to preach. These troglodytes are killing me, but, to paraphrase the great Charlie Brown, “I won’t let all this idiocy ruin my Christmas.”

Be good. Support science. Stay well. And Have a Holly, Jolly Holiday Season!

Post Notes

You told me again

You preferred handsome men

But for me

You’d make an exception

Leonard Cohen

Love Josh Groban’s “O Holy Night” and Sarah McLachlan’s version of “River”.

Highly recommend the poems in “Stag’s Leap” by Sharon Olds. But they’re rough.