Susumu Tonegawa Quotes

As biologists, we contemplate with admiration and awe the wondrous array of sophisticated cell interactions and recognitions evolved in the T cell immune system, which must be a model for other similarly complex biological systems of highly differentiated organisms.

As long as we do not know how the cell works, we don't know the kind of havoc the AIDS virus creates in the cell.

The immune system constantly creates genes on the fly that are specific to the things that show up in the body. It's amazing.

The production of antibody is not the only, nor I believe the most important, manifestation of immunity, but for reasons both historical and of experimental convenience, antibody is likely to remain the touchstone of immunological theory.

What attracted me to immunology was that the whole thing seemed to revolve around a very simple experiment: take two different antibody molecules and compare their primary sequences.

What the immune system of man has in its advanced development is what we call immunological memory, so that once it sees something for the first time, when it sees it the second or the third time, it can respond against it in a way that's much more accelerated than when it sees it for the first time.

I like to think that when Medawar and his colleagues showed that immunological tolerance could be produced experimentally, the new immunology was born.

Physiology has spawned many biological sciences, amongst them my own field of pharmacology.

The study of the amino acid sequence around the disulphide bonds of the immunoglobulins was my own short-cut to the understanding of antibody diversity.

Some of the most significant advances in molecular biology have relied upon the methodology of genetics. The same statement may be made concerning our understanding of immunological phenomena.

When an animal is infected, either naturally or by experimental injection, with a bacterium, virus, or other foreign body, the animal recognises this as an invader and acts in such a way as to remove or destroy it.

My interest was directed, from my medical student days, to Immunology, and particularly to the mechanism of hypersensitivity. I had suffered from bronchial asthma as a child and had developed a deep curiosity in allergic phenomena.

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases is an institute of the National Institutes of Health that is responsible predominantly for basic and clinical research in the diagnosis, treatment and prevention of immunologic and infectious diseases.

But while doing that I'd been following a variety of fields in science and technology, including the work in molecular biology, genetic engineering, and so forth.

Back in 1962, when I had by accident become the supervisor of Roberto Celis in Argentina, it occurred to me that antibody diversity might arise from the joining by disulphide bridges of a variety of small polypeptides in combinatorial patterns.

The immune system's goal is to protect the body against invaders either from without, such as microbes, or from within, such as cancers and different types of neoplastic transformation.

Cancer is like a cockroach. It just comes back stronger. I'm tearing apart the immune system of the cockroach and seeing how it ticks. I've opened up my own pathology center.

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.

The immune system has evolved the capacity to react specifically with a very large number of foreign molecules with which it had no previous contact while avoiding reactivity for autologous molecules, naturally antigenic in other species or in other individuals of the same species.

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

There are two main types of immunity to an infection. Innate immunity comes from circulating cells that attack any invader the body views as foreign. Adaptive immunity is specific to the pathogen presented. Through adaptive response, immune cells are programmed to secrete antibodies that are primed to target a viral invader.

I like to read general biology - things about the immune system and advances in that area - because it lays the foundation for my part of the dialogue at the foundation about what things we ought to pursue.

It is now widely realized that nearly all the 'classical' problems of molecular biology have either been solved or will be solved in the next decade. The entry of large numbers of American and other biochemists into the field will ensure that all the chemical details of replication and transcription will be elucidated. Because of this, I have long felt that the future of molecular biology lies in the extension of research to other fields of biology, notably development and the nervous system.

What attracted me to immunology was that the whole thing seemed to revolve around a very simple experiment: take two different antibody molecules and compare their primary sequences. The secret of antibody diversity would emerge from that. Fortunately at the time I was sufficiently ignorant of the subject not to realise how naive I was being.

I've always been interested in science - one of my favourite books is James Watson's 'Molecular Biology of the Gene.'