Nobel Prize Series Words: Physiology/Medicine

Congratulations to Yoshinori Ohsumi of  Tokyo Institute of Technology’s Frontier Research Center, who won the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physiology/Medicine for his work in the mechanisms and understanding of autophagy.  Dr. Ohsumi is no stranger to prizes-he’s won just about every prize available to him.  

Autophagy is the natural process by which living things (including human cells) remove and replace unnecessary or unhealthy cells.   Autophagy was first observed and described in 1962 by Keith R. Porter and his student Thomas Ashford at the Rockefeller Institute, where Dr. Osumi later studied the same subject.  Not quite sure of the mechanism they were observing, Ashford and Porter called it autolysis after the work of  Christian de Duve and Alex B. Novikoff. It was de Duve who recognized the importance and significance of the process and gave the name autophagy. Autophagy comes via scientific Latin via the Ancient Greek auto- () meaning self, of the self, a reflexive word buildng element and -phagy from phagos/phagein () meaning eater of/to eat.  

Photo of Yoshinori Ohsumi used with permission via Wikipedia By 大臣官房人事課 - 平成27年度 文化功労者：文部科学省, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=52028935