Susumu Tonegawa
Susumu Tonegawa
Susumu Tonegawais a Japanese scientist who was the sole recipient of the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1987, for his discovery of the genetic mechanism that produces antibody diversity. Although he won the Nobel Prize for his work in immunology, Tonegawa is a molecular biologist by training and he again changed fields following his Nobel Prize win; he now studies neuroscience, examining the molecular, cellular and neuronal basis of memory formation and retrieval...
NationalityJapanese
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth6 September 1939
CountryJapan
I see myself as a scientist who is interested in what's going on inside of us.
In the early Seventies, the technology for purifying a specific eukaryotic mRNA was just becoming available.
Independent of what is happening around you in the outside world, humans constantly have internal activity in the brain.
It doesn't matter whether it is chemistry or immunology or neuroscience: I just do research on what I find interesting.
My father was an engineer working for a textile company that had several factories scattered in rural towns in the southern part of Japan.
My scientific career has developed on three continents: Asia, Europe and North America.
Recalling a memory is not like playing a tape recorder. It's a creative process.
The brain is hugely complicated, and because it is so complicated, it requires multidisciplinary research.
After I arrived in Basel, I initially attempted to continue the project of my days in Dulbecco's laboratory, namely, the transcriptional control of the simian virus 40 genes.
Although we often discussed the idea of research on the nature of antigen recognition by T cells in the laboratory in the late Seventies while I was still in Basel, the real work did not start until the early Eighties in my new laboratory at M.I.T.
At the suggestion of Professor Itaru Watanabe, and with his help, I left Japan at the age of twenty-three to pursue graduate study at the University of California at San Diego.
I commuted to the prestigious Hibiya High School from my uncle's home in Tokyo. During the high school years, I developed an interest in chemistry, so upon graduation, I chose to take an entrance examination for the Department of Chemistry of the University of Kyoto, the old capital of Japan.
I decided to pursue graduate study in molecular biology and was accepted by Professor Itaru Watanabe's laboratory at the Institute for Virus Research at the University of Kyoto, one of a few laboratories in Japan where U.S.-trained molecular biologists were actively engaged in research.
Immunologists agreed that an individual vertebrate synthesizes many millions of structurally different forms of antibody molecules even before it encounters an antigen.