Nobel Prize in medicine awarded to Japan’s Yoshinori Ohsumi
Nobel Prize in medicine awarded to Japan’s Yoshinori Ohsumi for work on ‘cell recycling’ Japanese scientist Yoshinori Ohsumi has won the 2016 Nobel Prize in Medicine for discovering and elucidating a key mechanism in our body's defense system that involves degrading and recycling cellular components. Known as autophagy, this process plays an important role in cancer, Alzheimer's, type 2 diabetes, and numerous other devastating diseases. In making the announcement Monday morning, the prize committee in Stockholm said the work involves a series of "brilliant experiments" in the 1990s involving baker's yeast that have helped explain how a cell, the smallest unit of life, adapts in response to stressors like starvation and infection. In studying thousands of yeast mutants, Ohsumi -- an emeritus professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology -- identified 15 genes essential for autophagy. It turned out that virtually identical mechanisms exist in humans as w...