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.

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

Humans are very imaginative animals.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.