Rabu, 30 September 2009

Susumu Tonegawa: Discovered principle for generation of antibody diversity


Susumu Tonegawa born on 6 September 1939 in Nagoya, Japan was a Japanese scientist whon won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1987 for his discovery of the genetic principle for generation of antibody diversity.

He received his bachelor’s degree from Kyoto University in 1963 and he received his doctorate from the University of California, San Diego.

He did post-doctoral work at the Salk Institute in San Diego in the laboratory of Renato Dulbecco, then worked at the Basel Institute for Immunology in Basel, Switzerland.

In 1989, he became a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and founded and directed what is now called the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory.

In the process to achieve the diversity of antibodies, he needed to protect against any type of antigen, the immune system would require millions of genes coding for different antibodies, if each antibody was encoded by one gene.

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