Discovery on ‘self-eating’ cells leads to a Nobel Prize for Japanese cell biologist
The 2016 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, awarded by the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet, has been recently given to Japanese cell biologist, Dr. Yoshinori Ohsumi, for his discoveries on the mechanisms underlying autophagy, a fundamental process for degrading and recycling cellular components.
From the Greek word meaning “self-eating”, autophagy is a crucial process wherein cells break down proteins and nonessential components during starvation to reuse them for energy. Autophagy is also used by the cells to get rid of damaged structures and to destroy invading viruses and bacteria, sending them off for recycling.
But little was known about this essential process, like what genes were involved or what its role was in disease or normal development. That is until Dr. Ohsumi began to study the process in baker’s yeast.
The autophagy genes and the metabolic pathways that he discovered in yeast are also used by higher organisms, including humans. Mutations in those genes can cause disease.
His discoveries opened the path to understanding the fundamental importance of autophagy in many physiological processes, such as in the adaptation to starvation or response to infection. His work also led to a new field that inspired hundreds of researchers around the world to study the process and opened a new area of inquiry.
As Seungmin Hwang, an assistant professor in the department of pathology at the University of Chicago, put it, without Dr. Ohsumi, “the whole field doesn’t exist”.
Dr. Ohsumi started out in chemistry and later switched to molecular biology after deciding that the field of chemistry was too established and had few opportunities for him. Dr. Ohsumi went through years of frustration and fumbling around before he found the work that would eventually lead to a Nobel Prize for him at the age of 43.
He encourages young scientists to “rise to the challenge” and to take risks in their fields. In an interview, he said that most people decide to work on the most popular fields,thinking that it is the easiest way to get a paper published.
But as he is not a very competitive person, he looked for new subjects to study, even if those subjects weren’t so popular. “If you start from some sort of basic, new observation, you will have plenty to work on,” he said.
The other Nobel Prize front runners included James P. Allison at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center; Craig B. Thompson of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York; Gordon J. Freeman of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute; and Tasuku Honjo of Kyoto University. Another scientist often mentioned as a Nobel contender is Jeffrey Bluestone of the University of California, San Francisco, who works on the immune system in disorders in which it attacks normal cells.
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