Nobel prize in medicine awarded to Yoshinori Ohsumi

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine is administered by the Nobel Foundation and is rewarded once a year for path breaking discoveries in avenues of science and medicine.

In 1895, Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel established five Nobel Prizes as a part of his will.

The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet awards the Nobel Prize for medicine and has 50 voting members.

Autophagy, in layman term is known as the human body's internal recycling program.

In this process, junk cells are hunted down and their useful parts are stripped out to generate energy or create new cells.

This process helps prevent cancerous growths and conditions like diabetes.

Discrepancies in the autophagy process have been directly established with Parkinson's disease, type 2 diabetes, cancer and age-related disorders.

Yoshinori Ohsumi, a Japanese cell biologist was honored with the Nobel prize in medicine for his discoveries in the field of autophagy.

71-year-old Ohsumi called the prize the "greatest source of joy and pride" for a scientist.

With this Nobel Prize, Ohsumi becomes the 23rd Nobel laureate from Japan.

He identified 15 genes in yeast mutants essential to autophagy and published results in 1992.

The Nobel prize committee in Stockholm said that Ohsumi's work involved a series of "brilliant experiments."

The committee wrote, "His discoveries opened the path to understanding the fundamental importance of autophagy in many physiological processes, such as in the adaptation to starvation or response to infection."

According to the committee, "The fundamental importance of autophagy was recognized only after Ohsumi's paradigm-shifting research."