The Nobel Prize winners for 2016 have been chosen and announced recently. New breakthroughs and innovations from different scientific fields show a promising future. In the field of medicine, the award goes to the study that shows how our bodies cannibalize itself.
Yes, you read it right. The amazing study was conducted by Japanese biologist Yoshinori Ohsumi who called the process autophagy. Autophagy came from two Greek words, auto and phagos, which means self-devouring.
To explain it much deeper, autophagy is when the cells recycle the damaged, worn-out, and sick cells into new functional ones. In other words, in order to give way for new cells, the healthier cells eat the weak cells.
This wonderful process is necessary because without this, the cells will just continue to spiral down and the body will eventually break down. Cells get damaged in different ways through the aging process, trauma, sickness, and infection. If autophagy is absent in the body, debilitating diseases, like cancer and Parkinson's, happen. That is because the damaged cells don't get recycled. Therefore, the healthy cells need to cannibalize these sick cells to keep the body in shape. Autophagy is also the reason why humans survive starvation because the process produces new energy for the body.
Even before Ohsumi's discovery, scientists already know that cells recycle themselves. However, it was Ohsumi who identified the "genes and metabolic pathways" that cause autophagy. His discovery led to the development of another branch in biology which focuses on how the body uses self-cannibalization to heal and keep itself healthy.
Ohsumi discovered autophagy during the 1990s when he was still a junior researcher at the University of Tokyo. Aside from the Nobel Prize for Medicine, Ohsumi received $1 million from the Karolinska Institute of Sweden. His contribution to medicine was acknowledged last October 3.
