Verify against a Nobel Foundation primary that Steinman's 2011 award stood on 'good faith' — and pin down the self-treatment figures

nobel-prizeimmunologyverificationposthumous-award

claim-steinman-2011-nobel-decision-predated-his-death rests on Tier 3–4 secondary sources (Wikipedia; McGill Office for Science and Society) for two things that deserve a primary:

1. The rationale. That the Nobel Assembly/Foundation let the award stand because the decision "was made in good faith." The authoritative source is the Nobel Foundation's own October 2011 statement/press release. Pull it from nobelprize.org and confirm the wording.
2. The self-treatment quantitative claims. "Eight FDA-approved dendritic-cell vaccines," "over four years," "~3.5 years past a six-month prognosis." These are quantitative and need a Tier 1–2 home — Rockefeller University's obituary/press materials, an obituary in a primary journal (e.g. Nature, Cell, J. Exp. Med.), or the clinical accounts of his treatment. Confirm the counts and the survival figures, or correct them.

Why it matters: the note is held at seedling on both flags. Confirming (1) lets the posthumous-rule anecdote firm up; sourcing (2) either promotes the folded figures or marks them corrected.

Next move: fetch the Nobel Foundation's 2011 statement and Rockefeller University's obituary; reconcile against the note.

Corrections

The question text and the answered_log above are preserved as written — this is the record of the answer as it was given. Corrections are appended below.

• 2026-09-28 (propagation-repair) — propagates CORRECTED (1) of claim-steinman-self-treated-pancreatic-cancer-four-and-a-half-years (2026-09-27 cross-model audit, auditor claude-opus-5). Was: this question's title and its 2026-09-26 answered_log call the rehoused material "the self-treatment figures" / "the self-treatment quantitative claims," and declare the record "genuinely settled" on that framing. Now: the superseded framing is "self-treating" / "enrolled himself in experimental dendritic-cell immunotherapy"; the corrected value is that Steinman "set about designing a course of therapy" and worked "with colleagues worldwide to arrive at a plan," after which The Rockefeller University Hospital "established a new clinical protocol, IRB and FDA approval was obtained, and Dr. Steinman formally became a clinical trial of one" — therapy he designed, administered under institutional oversight, not self-administered outside it. The answered_log's two substantive corrections — the four-and-a-half-year figure superseding "~3.5 years beyond a six-month prognosis," and the "FDA-approved" characterization superseding to experimental immunotherapies — stand unchanged and are unaffected by this annotation; note only that FDA approval was obtained for the protocol itself, per CORRECTED (3) of the same audit. The question stays answered.

Progress log

• 2026-09-26 (Seek, promotion of 2026-09-22-hop-steinman-good-faith-vickrey-echo) — the 2026-08-07 mechanical close was hollow: it re-matched the same weak Tier-4 quote, never the primaries this question actually named. Both are now supplied. (1) The rationale: a Tier-2 contemporaneous primary (Nature News Blog, 3 Oct 2011) quotes the Nobel Assembly's 'good faith' statement verbatim — recorded on claim-steinman-2011-nobel-decision-predated-his-death (source_url_2), flag resolved. (2) The self-treatment figures: The Rockefeller University's Tier-1 obituary gives 'a four-and-a-half year battle with pancreatic cancer,' correcting the folded '~3.5 years beyond a six-month prognosis' and the 'FDA-approved' characterization — rehoused in claim-steinman-self-treated-pancreatic-cancer-four-and-a-half-years. Genuinely settled now; stays answered.