Susumu Tonegawa Quotes

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.

Humans are very imaginative animals.

Independent of what is happening around you in the outside world, humans constantly have internal activity in the brain.

The brain is hugely complicated, and because it is so complicated, it requires multidisciplinary research.

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 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.

When General Motors builds a car, they want to meet the specific needs of many customers. But if they custom-make each car, then it will not be economical.

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.

Recalling a memory is not like playing a tape recorder. It’s a creative process.

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.

My scientific career has developed on three continents: Asia, Europe and North America.

My father was an engineer working for a textile company that had several factories scattered in rural towns in the southern part of Japan.

In the early Seventies, the technology for purifying a specific eukaryotic mRNA was just becoming available.

In 1981, after ten years in Basel, I returned to the United States to continue my research on the immune system at the Center for Cancer Research of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where Director Salvador E. Luria provided me with an excellent laboratory.

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