MIT memorial for Nobel laureate Susumu Tonegawa launches $100,000 research fund

What happened

MIT held a memorial service on Oct. 16 for Susumu Tonegawa, the 1987 Nobel laureate who taught at the institute for over four decades before his death on July 11, MIT News reported. Family members, lab alumni and colleagues met in MIT Building 46 and online, where 16 speakers offered tributes that focused more on his mentorship and character than on his prizes.

Picower Institute director Myriam Heiman used the gathering to announce that a donor has pledged $100,000 to start the Susumu Tonegawa Memorial Fund. The endowed fund is intended to give long-term backing to curiosity-driven research at the institute, and MIT is inviting additional gifts to enlarge it.

Former trainees described a mentor who set exacting standards while urging them to take on ambitious problems outside their prior training. School of Science Dean Nergis Mavalvala credited him with building a neuroscience community at MIT, and Matt Wilson, his first faculty hire for the memory center, recalled his certainty that the venture would succeed.

Context

Tonegawa won the Nobel Prize for immunology research that helped explain antibody diversity and later turned to studying how memories are stored and recalled. He crossed the Pacific in the 1960s for graduate work in molecular biology in San Diego, finishing in 1968. In 1994 he founded MIT's Center for Learning and Memory, now the Picower Institute, and helped design its home, Building 46, with architect Charles Correa.