Yoshinori Ohsumi attends press conference at Tokyo Institute of Technology on October 3, 2016 in Tokyo, Japan. The 2016 Nobel Prize for physiology/medicine was awarded to Yoshinori Ohsumi of the Tokyo Institute of Technology for discoveries about autophagy - how the body breaks down and recycles cellular components.
Scientists discovered that autophagy, a normal physiological process in the body that destroys cells, leads to inflammation and mucus hyperproduction induced by particles 100 to 500 times thinner than a human hair.