American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan and Japanese scientist Yoshinori Ohsumi has both been awarded with a Nobel prize this year.
Bob Dylan has been awarded the 2016 Nobel prize for Literature, this is the first time an award has been presented to someone seen as a musician. He was awarded this prestigious award for “having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”.
image via Music Times
Yoshinori Ohsumi has been awarded the 2016 Nobel prize for medicine or physiology for his research and discovery of how cells break down, recycling their content, leading to a further understanding of how incurable diseases (such as cancer, type 2 diabetes and Parkinson’s) occur. This takes science one step closer to discovering how to cure diseases we are yet to develop treatments for.
The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet awarded the prize of 8 million Swedish crowns (equivalent to over $1.2 million) for his work on autophagy, also referred to as ‘self-eating’ cells.
Video clip image via The Guardian
According to the statement, “mutations in autophagy genes can cause disease, and the autophagic process is involved in several conditions including cancer and neurological disease”.
Yoshinori Ohsumi has been a professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology since 2009, and shared in interviews following the award that he is “extremely honoured”.
Video clip image via The Guardian
The prize for medicine or physiology is the first of the Nobel prizes to be awarded annually.
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Watch to learn more about Yoshinori Ohsumi’s research and Nobel Prize below
Feature image via The Star
