Yushinori Ohsumi of Japan has won the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. The Nobel Assembly at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute announced the prize on Monday. The institute is honoring Ohsumi for his experiments with baker’s yeast in the 1990s. He studied a natural process in which cells break down and reuse some of their parts. This process is called autophagy. The word autophagy comes from two words in the Greek language. They are “auto-,” meaning “self,” and phagein, meaning “to eat.” The prize committee said understanding the science behind this process has led to a better understanding of diseases such as cancer, Parkinson’s and type 2 diabetes. The Karolinska Institute said, “His discoveries opened the path to understanding the fundamental importance of autophagy in many physiological processes.”