Overview
- Tonegawa, who died on Saturday, July 11, was 86 and MIT announced that his funeral was held privately and his ashes were interred in Kyoto Prefecture.
- In the 1970s at the Basel Institute he showed that antibody diversity comes from somatic recombination of gene segments, a mechanism that explains how a limited set of genes produces billions of different antibodies.
- He received the 1987 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine as the first Japanese laureate in that category and later won major honors including the Lasker and Gairdner awards and Japan’s Culture Medal.
- After his Nobel-winning work he shifted to neuroscience in the 1990s and published experimental studies on memory, including mouse experiments reported in 2013 and 2016 that probed how memories form and can be reactivated.
- Universities and government officials have paid tribute, noting his role in founding modern immunology, his long record of mentoring younger scientists, and the lasting influence of his work on medical research and biotechnology.