
2016 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine Is Awarded to Yoshinori Ohsumi [pdf] - sounddetective
https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/2016/press.pdf
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dekhn
I wish they'd rename the prize to "Nobel Prize in Fundamental Biology".
Medicine is important but this is clearly a fundamental biology discovery.

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jhbadger
Yes and no. You can argue that genetics of autophagy are fundamental but it is
clear that the prize is being given in recognition of the fact that this led
to better understanding of neurodegenerative disorders and so on. For better
or worse, the Nobel doesn't really go to discoveries that don't have
applications somehow.

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dekhn
It's disappointing that the "prize is being giving in recognization ... better
understanding of neurodegenerative diseases".

My point is that I think the prize itself should honor scientific
achievements, rather than medical ones, and that this discovery, on its own,
stands as a fundamental biological understanding. That it helped understand
neurodegenerative disorders is ancillary, and unecessary to justify the prize.

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zhemao
Alfred Nobel apparently disagreed, and it's still the interest on the money
bequeathed by his will that funds the prize. So it's unlikely that the name
will be changed.

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dekhn
Neither kind of restriction is applied to the physics or chemistry prize (they
do not require some sort of nebulous "medical benefit" to qualify).

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zhemao
I'm not talking about the medical benefit, I'm talking about the name
specifically. His will stated that there should be prizes for chemistry,
physics, literature, peace, and physiology or medicine.

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nibs
In case anyone is interested in the personal implications of this, this is
part the mechanism by which intermittent fasting gains it's health benefits.
People have fasted for 16-48 hours and gained benefits through history but
what is happening in the body is really ketosis + autophagy. Most people in
the modern world eat too frequently to benefit from autophagy, but men (16
hours of fasting) and women (14 hours of fasting) can both benefit from the
3-4x faster cell recycling and potential life extension properties. More:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autophagy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autophagy)

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lvs
Please, everyone in the IT/CS world, ridiculous health "benefit" claims are in
fact the origin of the term "snake oil." There is no accepted guidance from
the biomedical community regarding fasting that draws a link to autophagy.
Please keep your completely unscientific and unfounded health "benefit" claims
to yourself.

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nibs
It seems as though many of your historical posts are similarly angry "source-
your-claims" posts. Here is an article entitled "Short-term fasting induces
profound neuronal autophagy":
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20534972/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20534972/)

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lvs
Thank you for stalking. The paper you cite is preclinical work in mice, and
the mechanistic association between starvation conditions and autophagy
induction were already well understood before this paper. (That was, in fact,
the Nobel-winning work on which you commented.) Any consequential claims of
autophagy are unsupported by data in that paper, even in mice. The claim that
autophagy has net "health benefits" or "life extension properties" in humans
is completely unsupported and not something on which there is professional
medical guidance.

HN is replete with medical and health claims that should not be propagated by
responsible people. Face it: IT professionals don't have expertise in this
area, but that doesn't apparently stop you from having opinions and
propagating them authoritatively as truth. If you'd like to do original
research in this area, please do, but don't spread misinformation as if it's
factual.

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jharohit
Not to CRISPR - again!...

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zhemao
The Nobel Prizes in science are generally awarded a few decades after the
fact. That gives enough time for the impact of the work to become clear.

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jsferrei
Very true. It took 8 years for Craig Mello and Andrew Fire to be awarded for
RNAi (published 1998, awarded 2006 -- and that was considered fast). CRISPR as
a gene engineering tool isn't even that old yet, so we've got a few years.

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apathy
Counter example: yamanaka

