Japanese at MIT Wins Nobel Prize : Award for Medicine Stems From Research on Immune System
Susumu Tonegawa of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology today won the 1987 Nobel Prize in medicine for discovering how the body is able to produce thousands of different antibodies to fight disease.
In its citation, the Nobel Assembly said Tonegawa had shown in a pioneering set of experiments how the body’s immune cells reshuffle their genetic material to recognize and attack invading organisms that the body has never seen before.
The assembly said the 48-year-old Tonegawa wrote an influential scientific paper in 1976 on “the genetic principal for generation of antibody diversity,” and had dominated research in the field for the next two years.
Japanese Reporter Called
Tonegawa said today that a Japanese reporter informed him by telephone that he had been chosen for the Nobel Prize. “I did not really believe what (the reporter) said. I haven’t heard from Sweden yet. . . . But I’m starting to believe,.” he said.
Of his work, Tonegawa said: “I hope the information we got will be useful in developing responses to a number of diseases, including cancer and possibly even AIDS.
“If we understand how the (immune) system works, that information will be helpful in understanding what went wrong with it,” he said from his home in Newton, Mass.
Tonegawa, born in Nagoya, Japan, is a professor at the Center for Cancer Research and the biology department at MIT in Cambridge, Mass.
Worked in Switzerland
Much of his pioneering work was done while he was a member of the Basel Institute for Immunology in Switzerland, from 1971 until 1981, when he moved to MIT.
More recently, Tonegawa’s research group at MIT was one of several teams to identify the genes responsible for what are called T-cell receptors.
T-cells are white blood cells that perform a variety of immune system tasks. On the outside of the cell are the “receptors” where other immune system substances can plug into the T-cells and trigger them to go into action.
Tonegawa is the 144th Nobel laureate in medicine or physiology, and the first in the category from Japan. He is the sixth Japanese Nobel prize winner in any category. The most recent previous Japanese Nobel laureate was Kenichi Fukui for chemistry in 1981.
Studied in San Diego
Tonegawa received a bachelor of science degree at Kyoto University and a doctorate at the University of California, San Diego. He did postgraduate work at the Salk Institute in San Diego.
The Nobel Prizes for medicine, peace, chemistry, physics, literature and economic science are among the world’s richest and most prestigious. Each is worth about $340,000.
The Nobel Peace Prize winner will be announced Tuesday.
