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Yoshinori Ohsumi of Japan Wins Nobel Prize In Medicine For Study of Cell Recycling (theguardian.com)
Dave Knott writes from a report via The Guardian: The 2016 Nobel prize in medicine has been awarded to Japanese cell biologist Yoshinori Ohsumi for discoveries on how cells break down and recycle their own components. Ohsumi uncovered "mechanisms for autophagy," a fundamental process in cells that scientists believe can be harnessed to fight cancer and dementia. Autophagy is the body's internal recycling program -- scrap cell components are captured and the useful parts are stripped out to generate energy or build new cells. The process is crucial for preventing cancerous growths, warding off infection and, by maintaining a healthy metabolism, it helps protect against conditions like diabetes. The report adds: "[Ohsumi] said he chose to focus on the cell's waste disposal system, an unfashionable subject at the time, because he wanted to work on something different. By studying the process in yeast cells, Ohsumi identified the main genes involved in autophagy and showed how the proteins they code for come together to build the autophagosome membrane. He later showed that a similar cellular recycling process occurs in human cells -- and that our cells would not survive without it."
Now if only we could use this research to recycle First Posts we'd have the makings of a perpetual motion machine :D
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
I guess it serves to remind us that a cell is far smarter than a 'smart' cell phone.
...omphaloskepsis often...
Well if recycling is good enough for cells then it's good enough for cities.
Public radio was talking about this yesterday morning while I was driving to work. Will we see an article tomorrow then about who won the Physics prize today?
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Great - he can recycle my phone. Is it really worth a Nobel prize though?
it's a huge discovery and his first steps were pretty ingenious. like everything else in molecular biology the complexity is unreal and our understanding of all the various aspects is pretty trivial. the field has exploded and there's even a journal called Autophagy now, if that's any indicator of its importance. The main huge area of research of late is how cancer cells use autophagy to evade nutrient starvation under hypoxic growth conditions as well as survive chemotherapeutic insults. there's pretty cool specific examples in the literature of cancer cells eating all of their ribosomes (ribosomal autophagy- ribophagy) to rapidly shutdown most translation in a cell to go into an "emergency mode" and cut energy usage to bare bones levels. But cells also evade becoming cancerous by using autophagy to die so understanding the balance is critical.
blah blah tl:dr...congrats richly deserved
tem because he wanted to work on something different. Am I missing something here?
Just asking...
It never ceases to amaze me how much we still don't know about biology and life. You'd have thought that all cellular processes would be fully understood by now, but since we still don't even know the functions of all proteins (let alone "junk" DNA that has been found to have important functions as well), I guess that's obviously not the case.
Better known as 318230.
Yes. You are missing reading skills.
"...he chose to focus on the cell's waste disposal system, an unfashionable subject at the time, because he wanted to work on something different.."
Since it was 'unafashionable', other people would not be working on it. Hence, he would be doing something different than everyone else.
Why? Do you want to compose a critique of the socio-economic reasons that are the root cause of there having not been, or are you just out to play the white supremacy card over something won by a Japanese person?
Did anyone else just get a craving for pork rice bowls?