Susumu Tonegawa, Japan’s first recipient of the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine and a longtime professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has died, the university said Wednesday. He was 86.
Japan’s 1st Nobel laureate in medicine Tonegawa dies at 86
WASHINGTON, July 16 (Kyodo/APP):Susumu Tonegawa, Japan’s first recipient of the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine and a longtime professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has died, the university said Wednesday. He was 86.
Tonegawa, who died Saturday, won the prize in 1987 for discovering “the genetic principle for the generation of antibody diversity.”
The discoveries of Tonegawa, a sole recipient of the award, have “increased our knowledge about structure of our immune defense,” the Nobel committee said at the time.
It praised his work for “improving immunological therapy of different kinds, such as for instance the enforcement of vaccinations and inhibition of reactions during transplantation.”
Born in Nagoya on Sept. 5, 1939, Tonegawa studied chemistry at Japan’s Kyoto University and earned a doctorate in molecular biology from the University of California at San Diego in 1969. He was a member of the Basel Institute for Immunology in Switzerland from 1971 to 1981.
He later moved to the United States and became a professor of biology at MIT’s Center for Cancer Research. In the early 1990s, he shifted his research focus from immunology to neuroscience and founded MIT’s Center for Learning and Memory, now known as the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory.
“Today, we lost a giant. His scientific legacy will continue to shape neuroscience for years to come, and he will be deeply missed by all of us,” professor Li-Huei Tsai, who succeeded Tonegawa as the institute’s director, was quoted as saying by MIT.
In addition, Tonegawa served as the director of the RIKEN Brain Science Institute in Japan from 2009 to 2017, as well as the RIKEN-MIT Center for Neural Circuit Genetics.
Other than the Nobel award, he won numerous prizes throughout his career, including the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize and Japan’s Order of Culture.
Speaking at a regular press conference in Tokyo on Thursday, Japan’s top government spokesperson Minoru Kihara expressed “condolences and deepest sympathies” over the news of Tonegawa’s death, saying he “made outstanding contributions to the advancement of science and technology not only in Japan but also around the world.” According to MIT, his ashes will be buried in Kyoto following a private funeral.
