How Do We Acquire, Consolidate and Recall MemoryMITWORLD Video
About Susumu Tonegawa
Picower Professor of Biology and Neuroscience, Departments of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and BiologyInvestigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, and Director of the RIKEN-MIT Neuroscience Research Center
Susumu Tonegawa received his Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from the University of California, San Diego. After postdoctoral training at the Salk Institute, he joined the Basel Institute for Immunology. In 1981, he was appointed Professor of Biology at MIT and a member of the Center for Cancer Research. In 1994, he founded the Center for Learning and Memory at MIT. He is a recipient of the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize, the Gairdner Foundation International Award, the Order of Culture "Bunkakunsho" from the Emperor of Japan, the Bristol Myers Squibb Prize in Cancer Research, the Albert and Mary Lasker Award, and the 1987 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
ABOUT THE LECTURE:
In labs around the world, mice learn to navigate complex mazes, locate chocolaty rewards, and after an interval, run the mazes again with maximum efficiency, swiftly collecting all the sweets. But in Susumu Tonegawa’s lab, the mutant mice he has created cannot perform these tasks. Tonegawa “ knocks out” a gene that impairs a specific part of the mouse hippocampus, the area of the brain responsible for spatial memory, among other things. Mutant mice struggle to acquire and recall information about their surroundings. Tonegawa’s work involves manipulating genes to explore memory and learning from the most basic biochemical and cellular levels, up to the most complex behaviors. One of Tonegawa’s goals in designing defective mice is to simulate profound human disorders, like schizophrenia.
The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory
