2016 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

The 2016 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to Yoshinori Ohsumi. The prize was announced by the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm on 3 October 2016.

The citation

The citation reads: "for his discoveries of mechanisms for autophagy".

The laureate

Yoshinori Ohsumi was born in 1945 in Fukuoka, Japan, and is affiliated with Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo.

Why it matters

Autophagy is the process by which cells break down and recycle their own parts. Ohsumi's experiments with yeast in the 1990s revealed how it works.

The prize

The prize is worth 8 million Swedish kronor. It will be presented at a ceremony in Stockholm on 10 December, the anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite whose will founded the prizes in 1895.