Dr. Ralph M. Steinman was a creative and dogged researcher who spent years convincing a doubting scientific community that he had found cells that were key to the working of the immune system.

Diagnosed in 2007 with pancreatic cancer, which usually kills within months, he decided to try to fight back with a therapy based on his own discoveries decades earlier.

On Friday, he succumbed to the disease at age 68.

On Monday, the Nobel committee awarded him the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, unaware that he had died."

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