Susumu Tonegawa

Tonegawa Susumu

Susumu Tonegawa ( Japanese 利 根 川 進 Tonegawa Susumu , born September 6, 1939 in Nagoya ) is a Japanese molecular biologist and immunologist.

He received the Asahi Prize and the Avery Landsteiner Prize in 1981, the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize in 1982, a Gairdner Foundation International Award in 1983 , the Robert Koch Prize in 1986 and the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research in 1987 as well as the Nobel Prize for Medicine for discovering the genetic basis for the development of the wealth of variation in antibodies. He was also accepted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1984 and the National Academy of Sciences in 1986 . In 1998 the asteroid (6927) Tonegawa was named after him.

Life

Tonegawa was born in 1939 as the son of an engineer in a textile factory. He is the second of three sons and has a younger sister. For professional reasons, Tonegawa's father had to move regularly from one employer's production site to the next. Tonegawa grew up in several small towns in rural areas. When he got older, his parents sent him to Tokyo to see an uncle so that he could take advantage of the better educational opportunities the big city had to offer. Tonegawa attended the prestigious Hibiya School, where he developed an interest in chemistry. After graduating from school, he therefore took the entrance exam for the Faculty of Chemistry at the University of Kyoto . After failing the first attempt, he got a place at university in 1959.

After graduating, Tonegawa received a PhD position at the Institute for Virus Research at the University of Kobe, but after only two months his supervising professor advised him to go to the United States because of the better teaching programs . The Graduate School of the Department of Biology at the University of California at San Diego accepted him, and in 1968 Tonegawa received his Ph.D. He then stayed at Professor Hayashi's laboratory as a postdoctoral fellow until 1969, when he went to Renato Dulbecco's laboratory at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies . Since his visa was about to expire, he took the opportunity to move to the Institute for Immunology Basel , did research there under Niels K. Jerne and stayed there from 1971 to 1981. Then he accepted a professorship at MIT , which he did until holds today. Here he turned to neuroscience. Using the latest methods of genetic manipulation, such as conditional mutants of the mouse and optogenetic methods , he unravels the molecular and cellular mechanisms as well as the neural networks as the basis of learning and remembering. Tonegawa Picower is Professor of Biology and Neuroscience at MIT and Director of the RIKEN-MIT Center for Neural Circuit Genetics and the RIKEN Brain Science Institute . He is also a researcher at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute .

In 1983 Tonegawa was honored as a person with special cultural merits , in 1984 he was awarded the Order of Culture .

literature

• Gisela Baumgart: Tonegawa, Susumo. Werner E. Gerabek , Bernhard D. Haage, Gundolf Keil , Wolfgang Wegner (eds.): Encyclopedia of medical history. De Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2005, ISBN 3-11-015714-4 , pp. 1405 f.
• S. Noma (Ed.): Tonegawa Susumu . In: Japan. An Illustrated Encyclopedia. Kodansha, 1993, ISBN 4-06-205938-X , p. 1604.

Web links

Commons : Susumu Tonegawa  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

• Information from the Nobel Foundation on the 1987 award ceremony for Tonegawa Susumu (English)
• The Picower Institute: Susumu Tonegawa
• Tonegawa Lab