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Count Victor Lustig (1890-1947) was an Austro-Hungarian nobleman in the early 1900s. A brilliant businessman who was fluent in several languages, he lived a life of leisure on ocean liners, traveling back and forth between France and the United States. He made his fortune on these ships, selling his most famous invention: the money box. It was a device, the size of a large suitcase, that printed out a fresh new $100 bill each and every day – and Lustig was its proud inventor. 

Do I even need to say it this time? Except he wasn’t.

There is no such thing as a money box, and Lustig wasn’t even a real Count. He was born as Robert V. Miller in Hostinné, Austria-Hungary (now part of the Czech Republic). Lustig was just one of his many aliases, but it was his favorite, and is the name by which he has gone down in history – as the greatest con man who ever lived.

First class on a transatlantic ocean liner is the perfect place to run a confidence trick, or con. Fabulously wealthy complete strangers were thrown together for exactly one week, with nothing to do but try to impress each other with their fabulous wealth – and then they were almost sure to never see each other again.

And the money box was the perfect con to run in such a setting. It looked complicated, full of gears and levers and whirring noises, but its secret was its simplicity. In an unassuming unmarked box on the side of the machine, Lustig has pre-loaded around ten $100 bills, on top of a stack of bill-sized blank paper. Each day, on schedule, the money box printed out a $100 bill with great fanfare (corrected for inflation, that would be about $1,200 today).

Lustig would make small talk with marks (the con artist’s term for the person they are in the process of swindling) at the beginning of the voyage. He would gain their trust, then swear them to secrecy while showing his greatest invention.

When the mark inevitably asked where they could get their own money box, Lustig would initially refuse to disclose anything more. But as the week went on, he would relent, and say, well maybe I could sell this money box, if the price were right. Sometimes he would get two or more marks to engage in a bidding war, driving up the price.

Ultimately, he would sell the machine for $10,000 or more. He would wish a fond farewell to the mark, promising to write and to totally look them up next time he was in America. By the time the mark noticed that the money box was now a blank paper box, Lustig would be on the return voyage, running the same con on a new mark.

His record sale came in the 1920s, when he sold a money box to New York City gambling ring for $46,000. Subtracting the $1,000 in preloaded bills and corrected for inflation into 2018 dollars, he made a nice profit of half a million dollars.

But this is just part one of the story of Victor Lustig. We haven’t even gotten to the part where he vanished a jail cell on the third floor in Manhattan, in broad daylight. Or the time Al Capone called him the most honest man he ever met, while handing him a check for $5,000. Or his most famous con.

Coming on Monday: Count Victor Lustig, the man who sold the Eiffel Tower. Twice.

Update: In the original version of this post, I had corrected for inflation using 1900 dollars, when Count Lustig was 10 years old. I’ve updated the estimates to use 1920 values.

And the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine goes to:

James P. Allison and Tasuku Honjo!

That link goes to the official announcement. You can also read the Nobel Assembly’s press release (och även pÃ¥ svenska bork bork bork!), or watch the award ceremony from the YouTube include at the end of this post.

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2018 was awarded jointly to James P. Allison and Tasuku Honjo “for their discovery of cancer therapy by inhibition of negative immune regulation.”

or as I’d say:

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2018 was awarded jointly to James P. Allison and Tasuku Honjo “for finding a way to get your own immune system to fight cancer. Sometimes.”

That “sometimes” is important, of course, but their discoveries have led to better immunotherapy drugs, which are right now helping millions of people fight off cancer. These drugs are not a cure, and they don’t work for everyone, but there is no doubt that there are millions of people who would otherwise be dead, but who are alive thanks to Allison and Honjo’s work.

Neither of them set out to save lives in exactly this way. In the early 1990s, they were both basic researchers studying the human immune system – and if you need an argument for why basic research is important, there you go. Allison was at the University of California, Berkeley (he has since moved on to become the Executive Director of the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas), and Honjo was at Kyoto University in Japan. When they started this journey, they had never met, and I’m sure they had no idea they would both someday shake hands with the King of Sweden (watch how it works from the 2016 ceremony; the key handshake is at 31:53).

The immune system is incredibly complicated, and a wonder of human evolution. It is evolved to protect your body from foreign invaders like bacteria and viruses. Given that role, it would be natural to think of the immune system fighting cancer. But cancer cells aren’t invaders – they are your own cells gone rogue and growing uncontrollably. Normally, your immune system doesn’t even know that cancer is something to fight.

Here’s where the details get fuzzy for me, but people who understand this better than I do have come up with analogies that make sense to me, and I’ll pass them on to you.

When you look in detail at the how the cells of the immune system “know” when to attack, it turns out that proteins on the outer surface of the cell play an important role. These proteins “put on the brakes” and tell the cells to back off from fighting other cells. If you can find a way to keep the brakes from clamping down so strongly, you might give the immune system the power it needs to fight off cancer.

Allison studied a protein called CTLA-4, and Honjo studied a protein called PD-1. Their structures are very different, and they work differently – but the end result is the same suppression of the immune system. Interfering with the action of either of these proteins can sometimes result in the immune system attacking cancer cells.

Suppressing CTLA-4 works better to treat some cancers, and suppressing PD-1 works better to treat some others – but the best results come from both. So it was only right that Allison and Honjo received the prize. Each one gets a medallion, personally handed to them by King Carl XVI Gustaf – and they evenly split the total prize money of 9 million Swedish kronor (about $1 million).

Allison and Honjo would have found out they won a few days before the public announcement. And like most winners, they weren’t there for the announcement; instead, they pick up their prizes at a white tie royal gala on December 10th. But still, imagine you are them, watching the livestream broadcast and hearing these words, first in Swedish:

Nobelförsamlingen vid Karolinska Institutet har idag beslutat att Nobelpriset i fysiologi eller medicin år 2018 skall delas lika mellan

James P. Allison och Tasuku Honjo

för deras upptäckt av cancerbehandling genom hämning av immunförsvarets bromsmekanismer.

and then in English:

The Nobel assembly at the Royal Catherine Institute has today decided to award the 2018 Nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine jointly to

James P. Allison and Tasuku Honjo

for their discovery of cancer therapy by inhibition of negative immune regulation.

But still, they know that they’re not the heroes in this story. Here’s what Honjo told the New York Times:

“When I’m thanked by patients who recover, I truly feel the significance of our research.”

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqwFR5AmpZ4&w=560&h=315]

It’s Nobel Prize week! This week is to science fans what March Madness is to college basketball fans – the most exciting time of the year, when exciting results roll in seemingly faster than you can keep up with them.

The news began today with the announcement of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, then continues with Physics tomorrow (Tuesday), Chemistry on Wednesday, and the big one – Peace – on Friday, before ending with the slight anticlimax of Economics next Monday.

I’ll discuss each of the prizes on this blog, giving a quick summary of the results and my take on the research. It always takes me a couple days to learn enough to really make sense of the results, so don’t think of these posts as hot takes on breaking news. Rather, they’ll be summaries of some particularly exciting science results and reflections on what science means in modern society. As always, opinions are strictly my own.

Stay tuned for my take on each prize in the order it was announced. Up first: Physiology or Medicine on Wednesday.

It’s no secret: the world has gone completely insane.

And in this time of universal insanity, it’s good to remember the words spoken by the wise in the insane times of the past.

I’ve made a conscious choice to come down on the side of calm, conciliatory, and curious. I want to talk to the legendary “other side” and figure out what they believe, and why. I think it’s important to engage with the proverbial “other side” and to keep the discussion civil and positive. I don’t know whether that’s the right choice, but that’s the choice I have made.

But at the same time, it’s important to remember the words spoken by the wise in the insane times of the past, so I present the most famous line from the famous American abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison (1805-1879). Writing in the first issue of his anti-slavery newspaper, The Liberator – in an article titled “To The Public,” January 1, 1831, he wrote:

I am aware, that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for severity?

I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation. No! no! Tell a man whose house is on fire, to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hand of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen — but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present.

I am in earnest — I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a single inch —

AND I WILL BE HEARD.

This is the part of The Show where I put in a plug for my intellectual hero, Nate Silver, and his project FiveThirtyEight.com. Silver came to prominence in the early 2000s as a baseball analyst, at the forefront of knowledge in sabermetrics, the quantitative analysis of baseball. He created a series of statistical models to evaluate professional baseball prospects by comparing their playing statistics to past players at the equivalent points in their careers.

As a result, Silver became well-known among baseball fans, but still virtually unknown among the general public. That changed in late 2007 when he saw an opportunity: baseball had long since embraced performance-based metrics, what passed for prediction in politics was still laughable. A famous study, quoted in Silver’s book, found that predictions issued on a famous TV roundtable show were worse than random – a coin flip was literally a better predictor of outcomes than a panel of “experts.”

Silver jumped at the opportunity to improve political prediction, first publishing anonymously on Daily Kos, then starting his own blog called FiveThirtyEight – named for the number of electoral votes up for grabs in a U.S. Presidential election. He issued regular predictions for the result of the 2008 U.S. Presidential election – and ultimately nailed it, correctly predicting the winner of 49 out of 50 states (missing only North Carolina). In 2012, he did himself one better, correctly predicting the winner of 50 out of 50 states.

Then, of course, 2016 happened. Silver’s model assigned Hillary Clinton a 70% chance of winning the Presidential election… and Donald Trump won. Silver was criticized and even laughed at, even though he had been appropriately cautious all the way through. If the weather forecast says there’s only a 30% chance of rain, and it rains, the prediction wasn’t wrong. That’s just the nature of probability – sometimes, unlikely events really do happen.

FiveThirtyEight.com is continuing to issue its reality-based predictions. Here is their latest prediction for the 2018 House of Representatives election: