World
Ohsumi gets Nobel Prize in MedicineSTOCKHOLM — Japanese scientist Yoshinori Ohsumi was awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in medicine today for discoveries related to the degrading and recycling of cellular components.The Karolinska Institute honored Ohsumi for “brilliant experiments” in the 1990s on autophagy, the “self-eating” process with which cells break down and recycle some of their content.Disrupted autophagy has been linked to several diseases including Parkinson’s, diabetes and cancer, the institute said.Ohsumi, 71, from Fukuoka, Japan, is a professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology.Though autophagy has been known for more than 50 years, its fundamental significance was only recognized after Ohsumi’s “paradigm-shifting research” on yeast in the 1990s, Karolinska said.
Women protest strict abortion banWARSAW, Poland — Polish women donned black, waved black flags and took to Poland’s streets today, boycotting their jobs and classes as part of a nationwide strike waged to protest a legislative proposal for a total ban on abortion.Many men also joined women on the streets of Warsaw, Gdansk and elsewhere across the largely Catholic nation on what has been dubbed “Black Monday.” The country already has one of Europe’s most restrictive abortion laws and opinion surveys show very little support for an even stricter law, despite the nation’s deep Catholicism.The strike and street demonstrations follow a street protest by thousands on Saturday in front of the parliament in Warsaw. Under the existing law, in force since 1993, abortion is banned except in cases where the woman’s life is in danger, the fetus is irreparably damaged or the pregnancy results from rape or incest.
