The emperor and the prime minister of Japan honored Dr. Kunihiko Suzuki, professor of neurology and psychiatry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine, and five other scholars of Japanese ancestry at a special ceremony in Tokyo Monday (June 10).
The six received this year's Academy Award, the most prestigious recognition in higher education in Japan. Recipients were selected from all scholastic endeavors, including literature, philosophy, history, mathematics and economics, as well as all branches of science. A lunch at the Imperial Palace followed.
The academy consists of 150 members, only 20 of whom come from the health sciences. Seats are newly filled following the deaths of current members.
Director emeritus of UNC's Neuroscience Center, Suzuki received his undergraduate degree in history and philosophy of science and his medical degree from Tokyo University. After an internship, he trained as a clinical neurologist in the United States before committing his life to research into the genetic basis of neurological diseases.
For the past 40 years, Suzuki has remained at the forefront of neuroscience, in part because he and his laboratory quickly adapted and expanded on innovations in the field.
"It would be difficult to describe progress in research in neurogenetic diseases, particularly sphingolipidoses, during the second half of the 20th century without extensive references to Dr. Suzuki's contributions," the academy's citation read.
Among his contributions was determining the genetic basis of globoid cell leukodystrophy, or Krabbe disease, which affects the fatty sheath surrounding nerve cells. That work gave specialists for the first time the ability to diagnose the illness before death and subsequently, even before birth. Another was identifying that the illness was essentially the same genetically in humans and in dogs, which boosted research on the human form.
Still another was proposing in 1972 a theory known as the "psychosine hypothesis," which was at first received skeptically but has become increasingly accepted and now is thought to be relevant to other brain diseases as well. Since then, he and colleagues have done extensive work with both naturally occurring and genetically manipulated mouse models for currently incurable neurological disorders and have generated much useful new information about them, according to the citation.
Suzuki has served as president of both the International Society for Neurochemistry and the American Society for Neurochemistry and editor of the Journal of Neurochemistry. He also is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences.
For the past 40 years, he has continued to train young Japanese researchers in his laboratory, as well as Americans and other nationalities. Many of his 30 former students have played important roles in advancing the field after they returned to Japan.
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