Honorees will discuss cells, future of computers and fighting oppression

This helps produce the energy that cells need to survive and thrive. Think of it as recycling on a tiny scale. The process is called autophagy, and few people have done more during the past 25 years to explain how it works than Ohsumi.

Ohsumi studies autophagy in yeast, which is used as a model for the human body, especially in regards to the behavior of genes and proteins.

He has shown how the process is affected by starvation and other stimuli. It’s basic research that might be applied to fighting things such as obesity, cancer, diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease — and possibly to counter the effects of aging.

The key word here is “might.”

Scientists once thought that autophagy played a small role in human physiology. But more recent studies, including research by Ohsumi, indicate that the opposite may be true.

Scientists know that autophagy can go awry, and that such abnormalities can contribute to the development of diseases that affect every area of the body. They aren’t sure how often this happens or precisely why. But it appears that a lot of the triggers involve diet and exercise.



70, literary critic and educator, Columbia University

Before the practice was banned by British colonials in 1829, millions of Indian widows burned themselves alive at their husbands’ funeral pyres, a practice called Sati. Thousands continued to do so in secret for decades after the ban was enacted, leading prominent Western scholars to condemn that nation’s male-dominated society as oppressive and inhumane.

Spivak pointed the finger back at Western scholars, saying that they had failed to put the self-immolation into historical context. In an acclaimed 1988 essay, she suggested that the Indian widows might not have felt terrorized at all. She drew on cultural artifacts — books, paintings, transcripts of speeches — from precolonial times to make the argument that many victims of Sati may have accepted the self-immolation as a natural end to their lives.

Spivak has spent much of her life throwing up a hand, asking people to stop and look past generalizations and stereotypes about “ordinary” people, including working-class immigrants and the poor. She is deeply suspicious of colonialism’s continuing influence on Asians and Africans. She has inspired thousands of activists to fight against what she calls the injustices of the capitalist state.

Her goal, Spivak has written, is to resurrect lost folk wisdom and correct the false assumptions that she believes Western intellectuals make about Eastern cultures. For example, she is critical of the belief that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were simply an act of religious fanaticism. Spivak argues that suicide is, in reality, almost always an act of desperation.


In more recent years, she has moved away from criticism and toward philanthropy. In 1997, she founded the Memorial Literacy Project, an educational nonprofit organization for children in rural West Bengal.



