The Nobel Committee has a mixed record of choosing worthy recipients for the Peace Prize, which is partly why that award always gets the most attention. It’s a pity that this distracts from the truly awe-inspiring work done by the other laureates announced this week.

On Monday, three scientists received the Nobel for medicine for their research on the hidden machinery that makes the human immune system run. That started with the work of Shimon Sakaguchi in Japan, who decades ago discovered regulatory T cells, which make sure that the immune system is targeting dangerous invaders and not the body’s own cells. Years later, two American immunologists — Mary E. Brunkow and Fred Ramsdell — built off Sakaguchi’s breakthrough to identify the exact gene that governs these cells. Advertisement

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