日本又一科学家获诺贝尔奖

Professor Thomas Perlmann, Secretary of the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine announced the award at a news conference at the Nobel Forum in Stockholm.

"The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institute has today decided to award the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine to Yoshinori Ohsumi for his discoveries of mechanisms for autophagy." 

Born in 1945 in Japan, Ohsumi is a professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. He set up his own lab in 1988 and focused his efforts on protein degradation in tiny structures called vacuoles - the building blocks of cells which are found in all living creatures, including humans.

He starved cells in order to prove that the autophagy, or the self eating mechanism of cells, existed in yeast cells. He found that even during starvation, some cells were able to recycle themselves to keep themselves alive. A major break-through was made in 1992, after which Ohsumi published the results.

Professor Juleen Zierath, Chairman of the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine said Ohsumi's discovery was of major significance and has great implications for the future.

"What he could show was that because of the autophagy process this machinery the cell has a way to be able to renew itself. So not only the cell can break down the living proteins, the cell then can utilize proteins for building new proteins. So this process is really important because it helps us to be able to renew proteins in our body. The proteins we eat are not sufficient to deal with the demand of building new proteins so this is really an essential recycling plant that allow us to recycle proteins and to renew ourselves. So this is really a key from his work."

Zierath said Ohsumi's discovery will have an impact on research into neurological problems, diabetes and cancer.

The Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2016 is worth 8 million Swedish Kronor, about 930 thousand US Dollars, and opened the Nobel Prize giving season. The Nobel Prize in Physics will be announced on Tuesday.

The awarding ceremony is held on December 10th every year.