WAKO, JAPAN—Susumu Tonegawa, 70, has never shied away from challenges. He left Japan to earn a Ph.D. in molecular biology from the University of California, San Diego. After a postdoc at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, also in San Diego, he joined the Basel Institute for Immunology in Switzerland, where he solved the riddle of how mammals produce billions of different antibodies needed to fend off infections—work that earned him the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 1987.
Tonegawa was then at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, where he shifted his focus to neuroscience and in 1994 became the founding director of what is now called the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT. After a 2006 flap over the aborted hiring of a young female scientist at another MIT institute, Tonegawa gave up the directorship to concentrate on research. But this April, he became director of the RIKEN Brain Science Institute (BSI) in Wako, near Tokyo, a part-time arrangement that allows him to maintain a lab at MIT.
BSI was established in 1997 and now has more than 50 principal investigators (PIs) and a $100 million annual budget. Considered Japan’s flagship neuroscience institute, BSI is “pretty good,” Tonegawa says, but it doesn’t match the reputation and productivity of top U.S. and European neuroscience centers. Tonegawa spoke with Science earlier this month about how he intends to raise BSI’s game while coping with what he views as an inevitable downsizing…
