Question

Who won the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine?
Yoshinori Ohsumi
Karl Landsteiner
Eric Kandel
Willem Einthoven
H. Robert Horvitz

Answer 1

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2016 was awarded to Yoshinori Ohsumi "for his discoveries of mechanisms for autophagy..

Answer 2

The Nobel Prize in MEDICINE: Japanese scientist Yoshinori Ohsumi for discoveries related to autophagy, the “self-eating” process that lets a cell break down and recycle some of its contents. Breakdowns in the autophagy process have been linked to a number of grave diseases including Parkinson’s, diabetes and cancer.

Yoshinori Ohsumi

Facts

Yoshinori Ohsumi

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2016

Born: 9 February 1945, Fukuoka, Japan

Affiliation at the time of the award: Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo, Japan

Prize motivation: "for his discoveries of mechanisms for autophagy."

Life

Yoshinori Ohsumi was born in Fukuoka, Japan. He studied at the University of Tokyo where he received his doctoral degree in 1974. After a few years at Rockefeller University, New York, he returned to the University of Tokyo. In 1996 he moved to the National Institute for Basic Biology in Okazaki. He has also been affiliated to the Graduate University for Advanced Studies (Sokendai) in Hayama and to the Tokyo Institute of Technology, where he is now working. Yoshinori Ohsumi is married to Mariko Ohsumi who is also one of his scientific collaborators.

Work

In the lysosomes of our cells its components are processed for reuse. The mechanisms of this process were mostly unknown until the early 1990s, when Yoshinori Ohsumi conducted a series of groundbreaking experiments with yeast, where he detected autophagy and identified genes important for the process. Yoshinori Ohsumi's discoveries laid the foundation for a better understanding of the ability of cells to manage malnutrition and infections, the causes of certain hereditary and neurological diseases, and cancer.