MIT BIOLOGIST RECEIVES NOBEL IN MEDICINE

Author: By Peggy Hernandez, Globe Staff

Date: Tuesday, October 13, 1987
Page: 1
Section: METRO

Yesterday, Nobel Prize officials in Sweden announced that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor had received the 1987 prize in physiology and medicine for his revolutionary work on understanding the body's immune system.

"The first thing I thought was: It must be a mistake," said the boyish- looking professor from Newton, who learned of the award when a reporter from Japan called him early yesterday morning. "In the past, when I received prizes, I usually heard first from the organization."

The Nobel jurors in announcing the award said Tonegawa, 48, wrote an influential paper in 1976 resolving questions about how the body fights disease. The assembly said the Japanese native's work had dominated research in the area for two years.

Tonegawa's experiments found that a body's immune cells during a lifetime reshuffle their genetic makeup to form millions of antibodies against bacteria. The prevailing dogma had held that genes could not change, but that belief had confounded scientists who found that the body could resist newly conceived microbes.

"It's like when GM builds a car that they want to meet the specific needs of many customers," Tonegawa said yesterday. "If they custom-make each car, it is not economical, so they make different parts, then they assemble it in different ways, and therefore one can make different cars. It's a matter of how you assemble those pieces."

David Baltimore, director of the Whitehead Institute, a biomedical research facility affiliated with MIT, applauded the Nobel jurors' decision. "In terms of medicine, since the immune system is the key defense the body has against infectious disease, Susumu's work provided the key to how that system functions," Baltimore said.

"It can't be overestimated how important that revelation was," he said. ''I, and most of the scientific community, have been waiting for the Nobel committee to recognize what a pathfinding piece of work it was."

The Nobel jurors also will announce the prizes in chemistry, physics, literature and economics this month. The peace prize is expected to be announced today. Each Nobel Prize is worth about $340,000.

Although Tonegawa was cited for his work in immunology, he is a molecular biologist by training.

"It wasn't even his field," said colleague Nancy Hopkins, a professor in the biology department. "Susumu is really a spectacular scientist. There are people who are brilliant and come upon things through analysis. He's the kind of person who moves by insight with enormous drive, passion . . . There is a force in him, and when he has it, you feel it too."

Tonegawa expressed surprise at being named the sole recipient of the prize.

"You can't do this kind of work by yourself," he said. "There are many discoveries which I considered more worthy of the prize this year."

"He is very modest. He has always been that way," said his wife Mayumi, 33, who held the couple's 9-month-old son Hidde at the press conference.

Tonegawa described her husband as being open to all possibilities when wrestling with a problem. "He doesn't have any prejudices before he begins work," she said. "He has a pure mind before nature and science."

Even when playing with their son, she said, her husband is very serious and tries to communicate with the boy on a level both can share. She said father and son have a mutual delight in the music of Beethoven and Mozart.

Asked about her husband's difficulty in accepting the reality that he had received the award, she replied, "He's much more interested in what he's doing rather than what he has done."

Tonegawa's father, a 77-year-old retired businessman, called him yesterday
from Japan. "Obviously, he was very glad," Tonegawa said. "He may be even more glad than me. He always felt I would win, but he always wondered whether I would win while he was alive."

Tonegawa, a professor at the university's Center for Cancer Research and the biology department, was born in Nagoya, Japan. He earned a bachelor of science degree from Kyoto University in Japan in 1963 and at 22 left for the United States. He received a doctorate from the University of California at San Diego.

Following postgraduate work at the Salk Institute in San Diego, Tonegawa joined the Basel Institute of Immunology in Switzerland before moving to MIT in 1981. The bulk of the work that led to the Nobel took place in Switzerland.

Last month, Tonegawa was one of three recipients of the prestigious Albert Lasker Medical Research Award. Last year, he was named recipient of the $50,000 Bristol-Myers award for distinguished achievement in cancer research and was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Tonegawa worked long on the experiments to prove his theory about the immune system. When encouraging results came in, he said he was slow to acknowledge the breakthrough.

"I still remember the day I went to the lab and saw the results," he recalled. "I was very glad to see the experiment worked. But it took not even days -- but months -- to realize what the impact of this was. I guess these things take time."

Asked about the significance of the Nobel award in his life, Tonegawa said, "The birth of my son is greater than this."

"I was very happy to hear that, naturally," his wife said after the press conference. Then the couple left for Tonegawa's office to celebrate the award with champagne and cake.

HERNAN;10/12 NKELLY;10/14,14:56 NOBEL13