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2017.02.11

The Nobel Laureate Lecture of Professor Ohsumi in Okazaki City

A lecture meeting was held at Okazaki City Hall on February 11th, 2017 in commemoration of Yoshinori Ohsumi, a professor emeritus of the National Institute for Basic Biology, receiving the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. While his original Nobel lecture in Stockholm was presented in English, this was the first opportunity for others to be able to listen to the lecture in Japanese since it was first announced that he had won the award. The 400 seats allocated to members of the general public were snapped up within 15 minutes of the opening of applications to attend the event. As many as 1000 audience members, including 244 local junior high school and high school students from Okazaki and the greater Aichi prefectural region, listened attentively to Professor Ohsumi’s lecture.

 

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Professor Ohsumi gave a lecture entitled ‘Autophagy: An Intracellular Recycling System – The Joy of Observing, Understanding, and Elucidating’. The lecture included details concerning his earlier life, the process of launching his laboratory and discovering autophagy in yeast cells, and sequentially elucidating the molecular mechanism of autophagy with his fellow lab members. He also gave the younger audience members in attendance two messages. He implored them to put great stock into their interests as well as whatever spikes their curiosity, and to also determine their own path while not being worried about how this might make them different to others.

 

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After his lecture, Professor Ohsumi answered questions from the students. In response to a question asking “what is important when setting one’s goals?” he answered, “You should find out what you actually want to do. Get a feeling of what appeals to you and then cultivate that interest.” The following question of “Were you smart when you a child?” sent those in attendance into bursts of laughter. Professor Ohsumi said that “If you are equating having good grades in school with being smart, then I might have been reasonably smart…. Everyone is intelligent in their own way, and as such, I hope that everyone will find the area that they excel in. For instance, if I had a talent for music, I might have taken a different path. However, I had no talent in another field like music or sports. Upon ruling out other career possibilities, I found that I was best suited to becoming a scientist so I have become what I am now…. We should all consider what we are interested in while also thinking about what we think is important.” 

 

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In addition to this, Professor Ohsumi provided comments and advice to students currently engaged in research activities after they had given presentations. 

 

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At the start of this event, Professor Ohsumi also received awards from both the governor of Aichi and mayor of Okazaki. He adds these to the abovementioned Nobel Prize that he previously received in 2016.

 

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