A moment every scientist dreams of—the Nobel Committee in Stockholm announcing the prize winner. ...to Yoshinori Ohsumi.
The Japanese scientist was recognized for his years of research on autophagy—how cells eat damaged content and provide building blocks for renewal
Speaking in Tokyo, Ohsumi said the award was an honor, but he said the biggest prize was knowing that his experiments had proved so fruitful.
There is no greater happiness as a researcher than that this research into yeast
, into the fundamentals of living things, has turned into such a big springboard for the recent research into autophagy.
Ohsumi's experiments helped pave the way for research on drugs to treat diseases like cancer, Parkinson's, and diabetes
Although autophagy was first discovered in the 1960s, it was Ohsumi's lab that explained how it worked and why it was significant.
If you look into the records of publications, it's really been very few papers at the time that Yoshinori Ohsumi started his work—mostly his papers.
And then as it became clear that this path was of fundamental importance, many researchers became interested, with thousands of publications each year on autophagy nowadays.
So this is really a great example of how basic science, initiated
by a single person or a single laboratory, at least, can actually define a new field.
Seventy-one-year-old Ohsumi said he never thought studying yeast would lead to the Nobel.
But decades after beginning his research, he'll collect the prize in person at the award ceremony in Stockholm in December.
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