On Monday morning, Sweden's Karolinska Institute awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine to Yoshinori Ohsumi of Japan for his groundbreaking work on the mechanisms for autophagy, the process in which the body breaks down and recycles cellular components. Along with the honor and Nobel medal, Ohsumi was awarded 8 million Swedish krona ($933,000).
Ohsumi was born in Fukuoka, Japan, in 1945, and earned his PhD from the University of Tokyo in 1974. After a few years at New York's Rockefeller University, Ohsumi returned to Japan and opened up his own lab in 1988, where he conducted his work on autophagy. He is currently a professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, and said when he found out he'd won the Nobel Prize, "I was surprised. I was in my lab."
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