And that's a wrap
There we have it. The 2016 Nobel prize in medicine or physiology has gone to Yoshinori Ohsumi for his work on autophagy. The biological recycling system breaks down old or dangerous proteins and turns them into fresh building blocks for the cell. The same process keeps invading pathogens at bay and prevents the buildup of clumps of proteins that can lead to devastating neurodegenerative diseases.
For more on today’s prize – the first of the 2016 Nobels – see our news story here. We’ll be back on Tuesday morning with our live coverage of the Nobel prize in physics. We expect to hear the winner or winners at the slightly later time of 10.45am UK. Do join us if you can.
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Juleen Zierath, a member of the Nobel committee, has been talking about the work that led to today’s prize. Until Ohsumi came on the scene in the 1990s, scientists thought that cells had a dumping ground for waste, but not the sophisticated recycling centre that Ohsumi discovered. Here she explains the day-to-day importance of autophagy in simply maintaining healthy cells in the body:
Every day we need to replace about 200-300g of protein in our bodies. Every two to three months, every protein in our body turns over. Because of autophagy, these 200-300g of proteins are made. We are eating proteins every day, about 70g, but that’s not enough to take care of the requirement to make new proteins. Because of this machinery, we’re able to rely on some of our own proteins, maybe the damaged proteins or the long-lived proteins, and they are recycled with this sophisticated machinery so that we can sustain and we survive.
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Ohsumi on winning the prize
Ohsumi was in his lab when he received the call from Stockholm today. “I was surprised,” he told Adam Smith at Nobel Media in a telephone interview after the announcement. Ohsumi always believed that the most fundamental functions of cells should be conserved, from yeast to mammals. And so it proved with autophagy: it’s an indication of just how important the process is. His pioneering work gave the rest of the scientific community the tools they needed to explore autophagy, transforming it from niche area to one of the most popular in biology. But as Ohsumi said, more than 20 years after he started, there is still plenty to learn:
We have so many questions. Even now we have more questions than when I started.
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If you’re having trouble grasping autophagy (or even pronouncing the word), here’s an interpretation of the process from dancers at the University of Michigan. It’s quite a thing.
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Ohsumi, 71, has been talking to the Japanese broadcaster NHK. In a live phone interview, he said he was “extremely honoured” to have won the prize. When asked why he decided to study autophagy, he replied:
I wanted to do something different from other people. I thought auto-decomposition was going to be an interesting topic.
He added that the “human body is always repeating the auto-decomposition process, or cannibalism, and there is a fine balance between formation and decomposition. That’s what life is about.”
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"It's very well deserved"
The prize has gone down well with David Rubinsztein, professor of molecular neurogenetics at Cambridge University. He studies autophagy, and one branch of his research looks at whether ramping up autophagy in cells can help keep neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s at bay. The work comes from the discovery that autophagy can get rid of proteins that can wreak havoc by clumping together in cells. Here’s what he had to say:
I’m very happy he’s got this year’s Nobel prize, it’s very well deserved. There are many other people who’ve made important contributions in the field, but I’m very comfortable he’s the sole winner.
Rubinsztein said the work highlighted how basic research in model organisms – in this case, yeast – can lead to the creation of whole new fields and fresh insights into human disease.
It shows the importance of basic science and it shows you can make great discoveries that transform a field by starting in a model system like yeast. So when people worry about what should science funding be used for, it’s very difficult to predict what’s ultimately going to come up trumps, and by being restrictive, or penalising people who work on model systems that don’t look like they’re obviously related to human disease, you risk hampering the development of that field. You have to think of science in a holistic way, and understand that key discoveries that can be truly transformative can be made maybe more easily in these systems. It’s a really nice example of how basic science in a model system can be truly transformative.
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In the years since autophagy research began, scientists have worked out that it is essential for survival. Ohsumi wrote a history of the field in 2014, by which time it had become one of the hottest topics in biology. He describes how streptococcus and salmonella bacteria that infect cells can be dealt with by the autophagy process. Meanwhile other pathogens, such as listeria and shigella, escape destruction.
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Here is why autophagy matters, courtesy of the Nobel Foundation:
We now know that autophagy controls important physiological functions where cellular components need to be degraded and recycled. Autophagy can rapidly provide fuel for energy and building blocks for renewal of cellular components, and is therefore essential for the cellular response to starvation and other types of stress. After infection, autophagy can eliminate invading intracellular bacteria and viruses. Autophagy contributes to embryo development and cell differentiation. Cells also use autophagy to eliminate damaged proteins and organelles, a quality control mechanism that is critical for counteracting the negative consequences of ageing.
Disrupted autophagy has been linked to Parkinson’s disease, type 2 diabetes and other disorders that appear in the elderly. Mutations in autophagy genes can cause genetic disease. Disturbances in the autophagic machinery have also been linked to cancer. Intense research is now ongoing to develop drugs that can target autophagy in various diseases.
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Here is Ohsumi explaining his work on autophagy in a 2015 lecture at the University of Toronto:
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What is autophagy?
But what is autophagy?
A simple translation is “self-eat”, but this is really about how cells recycle their contents. It might like sound an odd thing for a cell to do, but it has been known about since the 1960s, when scientists first noticed that cells can trash their innards by enclosing them in a membrane and transporting the sack of material to the cell’s recycling centre. Yoshinori Ohsumi identified a set of genes that control autophagy in baker’s yeast, and went on to show the same mechanism is at work in humans. This is how cells recycle their contents.
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And the winner is:
BREAKING NEWS The 2016 #NobelPrize #Medicine awarded to Yoshinori Ohsumi @tokyotech_en ”for his discoveries of mechanisms for autophagy” pic.twitter.com/PDxWbSqoIX
— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 3, 2016
Lest we all get carried away with thoughts of the wonderful new lives the winners embark on after the award is announced, bear in mind there may be downsides. I wrote a piece on this very thing back in the day. The Nobel physics laureate Andre Geim, who levitated a frog and included his hamster as a co-author on a research paper before hitting on graphene, told me there were too many downsides to mention. He added:
Journalists’ questions are the obvious downside in the context.
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The Nobel Assembly are keeping us all on our toes. The live feed from Stockholm appears to be struggling at best, and failing at worst. I haven’t seen or heard a peep from my video viewer since the start. But I have faith. Surely one place to find a decent engineer is the home of the Nobel prizes?
Nobel season always throws up a controversy or two. The problem originates in large part from the lack of transparency in the decision making and the tradition of handing prizes to no more than three scientists. When was a breakthrough last made by so few brains?
Take 2003, when the Nobel prize in medicine was awarded to Paul Lauterbur and Sir Peter Mansfield for inventing the ubiquitous brain-scanning procedure, magnetic resonance imagining (MRI). Another scientist, Raymond V Damadian, was so incensed, he took out a full-page advert in the New York Times to protest against the decision. The Nobel prize committee had committed “a shameful wrong that must be righted”, the advert said. The incident escalated into a full-blown bunfight, with other scientists piling in to defend Lauterbur and Mansfield.
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The judges for the Nobel prize in physiology or medicine are selected by the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.
This follows specifications made by Alfred Nobel in his 1895 will concerning which institutions should select the winners. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences got the physics and chemistry awards and the Swedish Academy got the literature prize.
The peace prize was given to a panel selected by the parliament of neighbouring Norway, which was ruled in union with Sweden at the time.
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The Nobel statutes prohibit judges from discussing any nominations – besides the winners – for half a century. Gustav Kallstrand, curator of the Nobel Museum in Stockholm, cites two reasons for the secrecy. First, the committee wants to spare those who were nominated but didn’t win the feeling that they came within a hair’s breadth of the most prestigious prize in science. “The Nobel prize isn’t a competition in that sense,” he says. The other reason is to safeguard the independence of the Nobel judges.
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According to stats from the Nobel Foundation, the average age of medicine prize winners has slowly crept up over the past 50 years.
#NobelFacts Average age of the 210 Medicine Laureates during the past century: pic.twitter.com/rVt98uy17l
— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 3, 2016
The Cambridge geneticist Sir John Gurdon, who turns 83 today, won the Nobel prize in medicine in 2012 for his work on reprogramming cells. His schoolboy ambition to be a scientist was famously written off by his Eton schoolmaster. Here’s the school report. Heartening, isn’t it?
Warmest congratulations to Medicine Laureate John Gurdon who turns 83 today! #NobelPrize pic.twitter.com/AnOdubOtWU
— The Nobel Prize (@NobelPrize) October 2, 2016
The 2015 winners
The medicine prize went to three researchers last year for discoveries that helped doctors fight malaria and infections caused by roundworm parasites. Half of the prize went to Tu Youyou, who stumbled on one of the most effective treatments for malaria – artemisinin – while working on a secret military project during China’s Cultural Revolution. The other two winners, Satoshi Ōmura and William Campbell, were honoured for their discovery of avermectin, a treatment for roundworm parasites.
Speaking at the time, Steve Ward, the deputy director of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, stressed the importance of the drugs:
Both of these compounds are central to current programmes to eradicate disease from the whole planet.
Elephantiasis and river blindness blight the lives of millions of the poorest people on the planet, and ivermectin [a derivative of avermectin] is having a genuine effect on reducing the burden of disease to the point that we can think about getting rid of them for good.
Artemisinin was discovered when fatalities from malaria were rocketing and the world was terrified we’d be looking at a post-chloroquine era. It has been a real game-changer.
Which to me sounds like a tough act for the 2016 winners to follow.
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Tips from the pundits
Plenty of Nobel medicine prize winners have previously bagged the Lasker basic medical research award. On that basis, we could take a punt on Kazutoshi Mori and Peter Walter winning the prize at some point. They discovered a quality control system inside cells that spots when proteins have become dangerously misfolded.
I’m always hoping to see the prize go to Karl Deisseroth at Stanford and others for inventing optogenetics, a neat and powerful tool that has revolutionised areas of neuroscience. Scientists can use it to turn off individual neurons inside living organisms, and so work out what the brain cells do. But would the technique even qualify for the medicine prize? Or is it one for the chemistry prize, which increasingly rewards biomedical research?
The analysts at Thomson Reuters wade through the Web of Science each year to compile a list of contenders for the Nobel prizes. This year they like the look of Gordon Freeman, Tasuku Honjo and Arlene Sharpe, whose work sheds light on the way cells are programmed to kill themselves off at the end of their useful lives. That knowledge has fed into the burgeoning field of cancer immunotherapy. Another tipped trio is James Allison, Jeffrey Bluestone and Craig Thompson who discovered how T cells, a major part of the immune system, are switched on. Another group that takes their fancy is Michael Hall, David Sabatini and Stuart Schreiber who discovered the target for the immune system-depressing drug rapamycin.
As ever, we are in the dark until the committee makes its decision known. We shall have an answer very soon.
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The Nobel season begins
Welcome to the most anticipated week in the scientific calendar. A time when the Nobel committees in Stockholm emerge from their secretive huddles, name the winners of the world’s most prestigious prizes, and leave the rest of us baffled about what was actually done and who really made the breakthrough.
The 19th-century industrialist Alfred Nobel built an empire on weapons and explosives before establishing the prizes in his will to honour those whose research most benefited humanity. This year each prize is worth 8m Swedish krona or £718,000, and a pile more in kudos. The Nobel prize is life-changing.
The fun kicks off today at 10.30am UK time when the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute announces the winner or, more likely, winners of the Nobel prize in physiology or medicine. The other two science prizes are awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. We’ll have the physics prize at 10.45am on Tuesday and the chemistry prize at the same time on Wednesday.
Do join us for the live announcements, explanations of the work, and reaction from the winners and others from the world of science.
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