Profile of Bruce A. Beutler.

Late one night in October 2011, Bruce Beutler checked his e-mail and saw a tantalizing subject line: it simply said, “Nobel Prize.” Beutler’s first thought was that it was a general announcement about that year’s Nobel Prizes, but as he read further he realized he had been awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. “Usually people speak of the phone call they received, but in my case I was notified by e-mail because nobody knew my phone number,” says Beutler. “There was a period of disbelief,” he says, but he checked on-line and found his name showing up in news releases all over the world, “and then I was very excited.” Beutler received the prize for his discovery of Toll-like receptor (TLR) 4, the first-known mammalian receptor protein of the innate immune system. Beutler discovered the process by which mammals, including humans, detect invading microbes, a crucial initial step in mounting an immune response. He shared the prize with immunologist Jules Hoffmann, who discovered an immune function for the Toll receptor in fruit flies, and Ralph Steinman, who discovered dendritic cells and their role in adaptive immunity. “The LPS sensing role of TLR4 was a huge surprise,” says Beutler, director of the Center for the Genetics of Host Defense at the University of Texas (UT) Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. Beutler had already received several other awards for his contributions to immunology and had just returned from Hong Kong, where he shared the 2011 Shaw Prize in Life Sciences and Medicine, when he learned about the Nobel Prize. He was elected to both the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine in 2008. As it turns out, Beutler got his first taste of scientific research thanks to another National Academy of Sciences member: his father, Ernest Beutler.