Tonegawa Susumu Quotes & Sayings

I see myself as a scientist who is interested in what's going on inside of us. — Susumu Tonegawa

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. — Susumu Tonegawa

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

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. — Susumu Tonegawa

Vaccinations are the application of evolutionary principles in action. If we can control the contact made between pathogen and lymphocyte populations, we can go a long way toward eliminating disease.108 It doesn't require total annihilation but rather a control on population dynamics. Vaccines are the way we use selective cloning to keep a pathogenic population in a state of benign coexistence. The process is based on evolution, as pointed out by Nobel laureate Susumu Tonegawa: Genes can mutate and recombine. These dynamic characteristics of genetic material are essential elements of evolution. Do they also play an important role during the development of a single multicellular organism? Our results strongly suggest that this is the case for the immune system. — Greg Graffin

The brain is probably the most mysterious subject there is. — Susumu Tonegawa

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

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

It doesn't matter whether it is chemistry or immunology or neuroscience: I just do research on what I find interesting. — Susumu Tonegawa

Recalling a memory is not like playing a tape recorder. It's a creative process. — Susumu Tonegawa

Our study showed that the false memory and the genuine memory are based on very similar, almost identical, brain mechanisms. It is difficult for the false memory bearer to distinguish between them. — Susumu Tonegawa

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

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. — Susumu Tonegawa

Genes work with probabilities; they don't work with certainties. So most things that you're looking at with these genetic tests, it's not like you're condemned to automatically get the disease or the syndrome. There's a lot of factors in play there. — Sam Kean

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. — Susumu Tonegawa

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. — Susumu Tonegawa

I was a single mom. — Allison Anders

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. — Susumu Tonegawa

Immunologists agreed that an individual vertebrate synthesizes many millions of structurally different forms of antibody molecules even before it encounters an antigen. — Susumu Tonegawa

Love is worth the sum of itself, and nothing more. — Alice Hoffman

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

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. — Susumu Tonegawa

Everybody thinks you can get by by being Mr. Nice Guy, but that's not what winning programs do. Winning programs have a plan. — Pete Sessions

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

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. — Susumu Tonegawa

And then I got into sports and gave my guitar to my brother Jeff who was just a little kid at that time. — Beau Bridges

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. — Susumu Tonegawa

Humans are very imaginative animals. — Susumu Tonegawa

The water bath has a platform which the rats learn to find because they don't like to get wet. Then you remove the platform. But you don't tell the rats. — Susumu Tonegawa