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[Yoshinori Ohsumi], who is currently a professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology in Yokohama, was recognized for his experiments in the 1990s, when he used baker's yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) to identify genes that control how cells destroy their own contents. The same kinds of mechanism operate in human cells — and are sometimes involved in genetic disease.
[...] "Without autophagy our cells won't survive," says Juleen Zierath, a physiologist at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm who was on the selection committee for the medicine Nobel. When cells are starved, they can consume their own proteins for fuel. The same degradation process can be used to eliminate damaged proteins and organelles — effectively, to renew cells and clear out debris — or to ward off invading bacteria and viruses.
[...] Ohsumi, who will collect 8 million Swedish kronor (US$940,000) for the Nobel prize, also won the ¥50-million (US$626,000) Kyoto Prize in basic sciences in 2012 for his autophagy work.
http://www.nature.com/news/medicine-nobel-for-research-on-how-cells-eat-themselves-1.20721
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autophagy
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 04 2016, @02:17PM
A lot of earlier biology research was poorly done or incomplete by today's standards. Part of the reason why there's still been advancement in the field is because scientists rely on independent replication of results in different labs using different techniques and systems. The scientific record tends to converge on the correct answer eventually, while filling in the details of mechanism and context in which the original phenomenon occurs. No matter how good of a study a scientist does, you cannot rely on a single finding to advance the field without confirmation.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 04 2016, @02:49PM
Replication is firstly a way to make sure we understand the experimental conditions well enough to explain to other people, and secondly to check that the phenomenon is relatively stable in time/space (and so is a promising thing to study).
While it is of utmost important to do replications, I don't see how replication addresses the problems mentioned above. A shit experiment that will yield misleading results is still the same thing the second time around.