Tonegawa, Susumu (1939-…), is a Japanese biologist who won the 1987 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for his research on the genetics of the immune system. He was the first Japanese scientist to win the physiology or medicine prize.
Tonegawa discovered how the body’s immune cells, with a limited number of genes, can produce tailor-made antibodies to an almost limitless number of disease-producing agents. He showed that the immune cells rearrange pieces of their genes to make many different antibodies, each fitted to fight a different infection.
Tonegawa was born in Nagoya, Japan. He graduated in chemistry from Kyoto University in Japan in 1963. He then started studying molecular biology, and later that year went to the United States. Tonegawa earned a Ph.D. in molecular biology from the University of California at San Diego in 1968. He did the research that won the Nobel Prize at the Basel Institute for Immunology in Basel, Switzerland, where he worked from 1971 to 1981. In 1981, he returned to the United States and became a professor of biology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
