A weary Shimon Sakaguchi arrived at the University of Osaka on the morning of Oct. 7 and managed to smile as he accepted a bouquet.
“I’m truly overwhelmed,” he told around 80 university staff members who had greeted him with applause. “Thank you very much.”
Hours earlier, the 74-year-old immunologist was named co-winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
Sakaguchi, a specially appointed professor at the university in Suita, Osaka Prefecture, said he was sleep-deprived from dealing with a flood of congratulatory messages and interviews.
“Now that I’ve been interviewed so much, it’s finally starting to feel real,” he said.
For years, Sakaguchi had been considered a candidate for the Nobel Prize. But his journey to this point may not have been possible without a couple of apparent contradictions earlier in his life.
FROM PHILOSOPHY TO SCIENCE
Born in Biwa village, now called Nagahama city, in Shiga Prefecture, Sakaguchi grew up surrounded by nature. He could ride by bicycle from his home to Lake Biwako and Mount Ibuki.
As a boy, Sakaguchi read children’s literature anthologies and became familiar with philosophy through his father’s library.
He attended the local high school where his father, a war veteran, served as principal.
Influenced by his father, Sakaguchi developed a passion for philosophy.
However, the father encouraged his sons to pursue science instead. Based on his own wartime experience, he believed that science majors were less likely to be drafted into military service.
After reading Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy,” Sakaguchi became interested in psychiatry.
With many doctors on his mother’s side of the family, Sakaguchi enrolled at Kyoto University to study medicine.
At the university, he learned that the immune system not only protects the human body but can also attack it.
“That contradiction is fascinating,” he recalled thinking at the time.
AUTONOMY PREFFERED
Sakaguchi pursued independent research, knocking on the doors of labs that were conducting intriguing experiments. He later moved between four research institutes in the United States, choosing autonomy over working under senior researchers.
Today, he still maintains his own lab at the University of Osaka’s Immunology Frontier Research Center.
Yasuhiro Senzai, 23, a sixth-year medical student in Sakaguchi’s lab, described him as a warm mentor who supports students’ interests and occasionally offers guidance.
“I want to become a scientist like professor Sakaguchi who makes groundbreaking discoveries and wins the Nobel Prize,” Senzai said.
Sakaguchi is known as a strict evaluator of doctoral theses, and there is a reason for that.
In the 1980s, when he began full-scale research on regulatory T cells (Tregs), the prevailing belief was that cells that suppress immunity did not exist.
“My work was ignored for a decade,” he recalled. “I tell students that achieving something takes time. To find something truly worth dedicating your life to, you need to think deeply.”
FAMILY SUPPORT
Despite skepticism of his studies, Sakaguchi continued his research while moving around the United States with his wife, Noriko, a dermatologist.
They met when she was a student in her mid-20s, got married and relocated to the United States. Sakaguchi was rotating among four research institutes every few years.
He did not secure a stable position until he returned to Japan at age 44. His research began gaining global recognition when he was around 50.
NO FAN OF PHONES
Noriko shared that Sakaguchi dislikes phones and rarely uses his mobile. When he was selected for the Gairdner International Award in 2015, he was overseas and she could not reach him. She had to call another professor’s mobile phone to get in touch with her husband.
Sakaguchi also often starts working just before the deadline.
“He always keeps me on edge,” Noriko said.
At Nagahama city hall in Shiga Prefecture, his older brother, Isaku, 76, and former classmates had gathered.
Isaku, a former high school teacher, recalled Sakaguchi saying that the Nobel Prize “isn’t something you get easily.”
Long considered a Nobel Prize candidate, Sakaguchi often told his relatives, “Things may get noisy in fall, but please bear with it,” according to Isaku.
Their mother died in January last year at age 104.
“She lived a long life, but just missed seeing this,” Isaku said. “It feels like our family’s determination helped win this prize.”
Masaaki Kimata, 75, Sakaguchi’s high school classmate, said: “He was always a top student. I thought he’d become a doctor but never imagined he’d win such a prize.”
JAPAN’S RESEARCH CLIMATE
Sakaguchi this year moved the base of his venture company, RegCell Inc., which aims to apply Tregs to medicine, to the United States.
Founded in 2016, the company faced challenges in Japan.
“It’s hard to take the lead on new things in Japan,” Sakaguchi said.
He said Japanese pharmaceutical companies are unwilling to take risks, making it difficult for researchers to gain funding.
“They keep an eye on various ventures and buy them only if they succeed,” he said.
In contrast, he said, “There is a culture (in Europe and the United States) that says, ‘It’s OK to fail, so just give it a try, and if it works out, that’s great.’”
Although Japanese researchers, including Sakaguchi, have led the world in immunology, both private and government investments in Japan are short-term and limited in scale compared with those in Europe, the United States and China.
Japanese research funding in immunology is only one-third the level in Germany, which has a similar size of GDP as Japan.
Research and development for therapeutic applications is advancing worldwide, but “it is not very active in Japan,” he said.
On the night of Oct. 6, after the Nobel announcement, Sakaguchi received a call from science minister Toshiko Abe.
The immunologist used the opportunity to voice his concern: “Support for basic science is lacking.”
(This article was compiled from reports written by Kazuhiro Fujitani, Shoko Tamaki, among others.)
AloJapan.com