Susumu Tonegawa

Susumu Tonegawa is a distinguished immunologist and a Nobel Laureate.

Susumu Tonegawa was born in Nagoya, Japan and received a bachelor’s degree from Kyoto University in 1963. He went on to receive a doctorate from the University of California, San Diego. After leaving the University of California, he undertook post-doctoral work at the Salk Institute in San Diego, before working at the Basel Institute for Immunology in Basel, Switzerland, where he performed his landmark immunology experiments. In 1981, he became a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and now serves as the Director of the RIKEN-MIT Neuroscience Research Center.

Tonegawa won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1987 for “his discovery of the genetic principle for generation of antibody diversity.” Although he won the Nobel Prize for his work in immunology, Tonegawa is a molecular biologist by training. and, in recent years, he has turned his attention to the molecular and cellular basis of memory formation. To achieve the diversity of antibodies needed to protect against any type of antigen, the immune system would require millions of genes coding for different antibodies, if each antibody was encoded by one gene. Instead, as Tonegawa showed in a landmark series of experiments beginning in 1976, genetic material can rearrange itself to form a vast array of available antibodies. Comparing the DNA of B cells (a type of white blood cells) in embryonic and adult mice, he observed that genes in the B cells of the older mice are moved around, recombined, and deleted to form the diversity of the variable region of antibodies.