Dan Kastner, Gerður Gröndal, Reykjavik, and Steffen Gay, Zurich, at the 37th Scandinavian Congress of Rheumatology in Helsinki, September 2018.
The establishment of autoinflammation is a milestone in medical research, unquestionably at the level of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. The news of Dr. Kastner’s award was promptly received with widespread enthusiasm by the profession. Dr. Kastner is a charismatic mentor of scholars around the world. One of them is Professor Karl Eklund of Helsinki who was president of the 37th Scandinavian Congress of Rheumatology held in September 2018; he invited Dr. Kastner to be a guest speaker at the well-attended meeting.
The Crafoord Prize was created in 1980 with a donation to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences by industrialist and philanthropist Holger Crafoord and his wife, Anna-Greta Crafoord, for the purpose of including subjects not covered by the five Nobel Prizes. The annual Crafoord Prize rotates among the areas of astronomy/mathematics, geoscience and bioscience, and a prize in the area of polyarthritis—Holger Crafoord suffered from severe rheumatoid arthritis later in life—may be selected every fourth year. The first prize for polyarthritis was awarded in 2000, when Sir Ravinder Maini and Sir Marc Feldmann of the U.K. were honored.
