Immune System

NEW YORK - Ralph Steinman, a pioneer in understanding how cells fight disease, tried to help his own immune system thwart his pancreatic cancer. Steinman survived until Friday. Three days later, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine. The Nobel committee, unaware of his death, announced the award Monday in Stockholm. Steinman's employer, Rockefeller University in New York, learned of his death after the Nobel announcement. Steinman's wife, Claudia, said the family had planned to disclose his death Monday - only to discover an e-mail to his cellphone from the Nobel committee.

BABY WALKERS. Parents, putting your tots in baby walkers may retard rather than aid their walking. "Recent studies have shown that walker use does not teach babies to walk earlier," the California Medical Association reports. "In fact, there is increasing evidence that the use of walkers delays or changes the way in which a baby learns to walk. " Since 1980, walkers have been involved in nearly 24,000 injuries serious enough to require treatment. Most accidents take place around stairways and stoves, leading the doctors to warn that babies in walkers should never be left alone.

Robert Ader, 79, an experimental psychologist who was among the first scientists to show how mental processes influence the body's immune system, a finding that changed modern medicine, died Dec. 20 in Pittsford, N.Y. His death followed a long illness and complications of a fracture suffered in a fall, his daughter Deborah Ader said. Dr. Ader, who spent his entire career as a professor of psychiatry and psychology at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry, conducted some of the original experiments in a field he named himself, psychoneuroimmunology.

RESEARCHERS have identified a mysterious new disease that has left scores of people in Asia and some in the United States with AIDS-like symptoms even though they are not infected with HIV. The patients' immune systems become damaged, leaving them unable to fend off germs, as healthy people do. What triggers this isn't known, but the disease does not seem to be contagious. This is another kind of acquired immune deficiency that is not inherited and occurs in adults, but doesn't spread the way AIDS does through a virus, said Dr. Sarah Browne, a scientist at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Major new clinical trials have been approved for a controversial drug that proponents say may prolong indefinitely the lives of patients infected with HIV, the virus that leads to AIDS, Food and Drug Administration officials said yesterday. The trials for Ampligen, an anti-viral compound, will begin next month and involve a total of 135 patients in as many as eight cities, including Philadelphia, according to officials of HEM Research Inc., the Center City firm whose chief scientist, William A. Carter, is a co-inventor of the drug.

Two months ago, Children's Hospital of Philadelphia made international headlines for using an experimental gene therapy to save the life of a Pennsylvania girl who was dying of leukemia. On Wednesday, the hospital made international headlines - and was denounced on Facebook as "cruel" and "heartless," as being "greedy monsters" and worse - for appearing to tack on hundreds of thousands of dollars to the original price of treating a Croatian child, Nora Situm, 5, with the same breakthrough therapy.

Two pints of bone marrow from a California donor whose tissue is genetically similar to that of a Bucks County leukemia victim at Hahnemann University Hospital were flown here and given to the woman last night in a last-resort attempt to cure her disease. The patient, Deborah Kelly of Levittown, beat 20,000-1 odds when her doctors located an unidentified donor in San Francisco whose bone marrow is genetically similar, according to physicians. That genetic similarity is so statistically rare that it has never happened in the 13-year history of bone-marrow transplantation therapy in this area, Hahnemann doctors said.

Deaths from acquired immune deficiency syndrome have passed the 20,000 mark in the United States, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control reported yesterday. It said that by last Monday, the number of deaths from AIDS had reached 20,342. More than 38,000 people in the United States have been diagnosed as having the disease. So far, almost three-quarters of the victims have been homosexual or bisexual men, including some who also were intravenous drug users. One in six has been an intravenous drug user who was not homosexual.