23 Quotes by Susumu Tonegawa

We found out that, contrary to what many people thought, in the immune system, genes can change during the life cycle of the individual.

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.

Even under normal conditions, how we can distinguish various events, various experiences, and be able to reproduce it later is, of course, a very interesting question and, I think, one that we face in day to day life.

I became fascinated by the then-blossoming science of molecular biology when, in my senior year, I happened to read the papers by Francois Jacob and Jacques Monod on the operon theory.

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.