Our stroke doctors should be able to figure out how to apply this to stroke to help our recovery. Which will never occur.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2016/10/03/nobel-prize-in-medicine-awarded-to-japans-yoshinori-ohsumi/
Japanese biologist Yoshinori Ohsumi was awarded the 2016
Nobel Prize in medicine on Monday for discovering and elucidating a key
mechanism in our body’s defense system that involves degrading and
recycling parts of cells. Known as autophagy, this process plays an
important role in cancer, Alzheimer’s, Type 2 diabetes, birth defects from Zika virus and numerous other devastating diseases.
In making the announcement, the prize committee in Stockholm said the work involves
a series of “brilliant experiments” in the 1990s involving baker’s
yeast that have helped explain how a cell, the smallest unit of life,
adapts in response to stresses such as starvation and infection. In studying thousands of yeast mutants, Ohsumi identified 15 genes essential for autophagy. It turned out that virtually identical mechanisms exist in human cells as well.
“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,” the Nobel committee wrote.
“Mutations in autophagy genes can cause disease, and the autophagic
process is involved in several conditions including cancer and
neurological disease.”
Autophagy,
which literally means “self-eating” in Greek, is a process of cell
renewal that removes damaged proteins and organelles. When this process
fails, it can speed up cell aging and causes diseases associated with
aging. On the flip side, “too much” autophagy can promote growth of
tumor cells in cancer and resistance to treatments.
Ohsumi,
who is 71 and now serves as a professor emeritus at the Tokyo Institute
of Technology, called the prize the “greatest source of joy and pride”
for a scientist.
“Looking into bodily processes, I found
that we have an ongoing renewal process without which living organisms
can’t survive,” Ohsumi told NHK, the Japanese public broadcaster,
shortly after the announcement. “This recycling process did not receive
as much attention as it deserved, but I discovered that we should be
paying more attention to this autophagy process,” he said, adding that
he was “lucky” to make the discovery early on in his career.
The
Nobel committee noted that “autophagy has been known for over 50
years.” However, its fundamental importance in physiology and medicine
“was only recognized after Yoshinori Ohsumi’s paradigm-shifting
research.” This amazing graph, which was displayed on a screen when the
award was announced, shows just how much other work has been built on
the discovery:
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