Word: tonegawa
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...University of California, Los Angeles, and French Chemist Jean-Marie Lehn, 48. The three were cited for their work, dating back as far as the 1960s, in creating artificial molecules that can mimic the behavior of hormones and other organic substances. The lone winner in medicine was Susumu Tonegawa, 48, a Japanese-born molecular biologist at M.I.T. His contribution: showing how a handful of genes in a small number of immune cells turn out a staggering variety of antibodies to protect the body against disease...
...M.I.T.'s Tonegawa might never have received his Nobel Prize if it were not for U.S. immigration laws. After his visa expired in 1971, Tonegawa, who had recently completed his Ph.D. at the University of California at San Diego, was forced to leave the U.S. He ended up at Switzerland's Basel Institute for Immunology, where he managed to solve a puzzle that had baffled biologists for a century...
...Tonegawa proved that cells accomplish the Herculean task of making antibodies to order by reshuffling parts of the genes that govern the production of antibodies, the cellular building blocks of the immune system. He likens the process to rearranging the boxcars on a freight train. "The dogma was that the order of the genes in any one person is immutable," he says. "The freight train never shifts its cars around." In spite of prevailing theory, Tonegawa found that the "cars" did indeed rearrange themselves in a multitude of different configurations to make the antibodies that fight off diseases. His work...