Thank you for stalking. The paper you cite is preclinical work in mice, and the mechanistic association between starvation conditions and autophagy induction were already well understood before this paper. (That was, in fact, the Nobel-winning work on which you commented.) Any consequential claims of autophagy are unsupported by data in that paper, even in mice. The claim that autophagy has net "health benefits" or "life extension properties" in humans is completely unsupported and not something on which there is professional medical guidance.

HN is replete with medical and health claims that should not be propagated by responsible people. Face it: IT professionals don't have expertise in this area, but that doesn't apparently stop you from having opinions and propagating them authoritatively as truth. If you'd like to do original research in this area, please do, but don't spread misinformation as if it's factual.

Counter example: yamanaka

Thanks, your assessment agrees with mine for whatever that is worth.

Alfred Nobel apparently disagreed, and it's still the interest on the money bequeathed by his will that funds the prize. So it's unlikely that the name will be changed.

Except it's not. Autophagy as a process happens at the cellular level but the whole reason it's important is because it has emergent ramifications for the entire living organism, impacting on metabolism, senescence, carcinogenesis and a number of other endpoints that operate at organismal scale. Your characterisation of this as "fundamental biology" obscures this emergence.

Appropriateness aside, I think the real reason we don't have a Nobel for Biology is probably a result of the fact that Alfred Nobel cared more about the pursuit of knowledge for the betterment of the human condition, rather than for its own sake. I imagine he learned the limitations of the latter approach the hard way through personal experience considering his most (in)famous invention...

Why? This is clearly physiology (how living systems function). And physiology is a field of biology. Biology also includes things like the dynamics of ecosystems and classification of organisms.

Physiology is a more descriptive term for this work. You could argue this is "cell biology", but that's just a claim that these fields are exclusive of each other; much modern physiological work is now understanding the underlying molecular processes (maybe it is molecular biology?).

His work on molecular mechanisms has brought better understanding of higher level processes in the body and traditional "physiologic" mechanisms.