Carousing, harmonica playing Texan just won the Nobel in medicine for his cancer breakthrough

Charles Graeber writing for Wired spends a lot of paragraphs describing who James Allison is and what he looks like, how he behaves and where he comes from, the decisions he made to go from places of little promise to the centers of study and funding, without any of the usual attendant hassles, and his vehicles as they upgrade across decades.

It is an interesting story of unlikely success.

Graeber describes the world of cancer treatment as dominated by surgery, radiation and chemotherapy that successfully treats some 50%. While immunotherapy was considered ineffective. The article takes the reader through our understanding of how the mechanisms of immune system work, through the discovery of the T-cell, how it was differentiated from the B-cell, how its receptor was identified, how it puzzled out that more than the receptor is involved in its activation, in fact, two more mechanisms are involved.

Biology was interesting, diseases weird and fascinating, immunology cool. But cancer, Allison admits, “pissed me off” personally. Allison’s lab had always been dedicated primarily to pure immune research. But now Jim Allison had another experiment in mind, and an intellectual path to an emotional destination. As it happens, that road also eventually led to the Nobel Prize. 

An analogy is employed the receptor identifies the cell for destruction as a key that fits into a lock, but that's not enough, another mechanism must be activated to behave as a gas pedal, but that's not enough either because yet another mechanism is behaving as a brake. In all cases of full activation; key, gas pedal and brake, the brake prevails. So nothing happens.

Allison developed chemical brake-blockers and applied them to mice given tumors. The group of mice treated with brake-blockers dissolved their cancer tumor cells 100% and the untreated mice died of their cancer tumors 100%. The experiment was run twice with the same result.

This anti-immunity therapy is a breakthrough for millions suffering from autoimmune diseases, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, asthma, and hopefully soon Type 1 diabetes.

His work continues to travel the world, and change it. Allison still plays blues harp—he considered backing Willie Nelson on stage a few years ago to have been a lifetime highlight, before he found out about the Nobel—and he regularly hears from former cancer patients whose lives were changed or saved by his work. He sees them in the halls and on planes; they are everywhere. Not only because they now number in the hundreds of thousands, but because they are us. 

And, his wife says, Jim cries, every damn time.