Dendritic Cell Scientist Wins Nobel Prize! Dendritic cell research got a boost when Ralph Steinman won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine.
Sadly, Steinman did not live long enough to receive the Prize, he passed away just three days before the Nobel Prize was announced. In 1973 Ralph Steinman and Zanvil Cohn published the first paper describing the discovery of dendritic cells in the Journal of Experimental Medicine. Cohn died in 1993 at the age of 66. In the paper Steinman and Cohn wrote, “morphological observations, both in vivo and in vitro, indicate that these novel cells can assume a variety of branching forms, and constantly extend and retract many fine cell processes.