Interview with the 1987 Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine Susumu Tonegawa, 23 March 2009. The interviewer is Adam Smith, Editor-in-Chief of Nobelprize.org.

Susumu Tonegawa describes the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT where the interview takes place, the work of the 1965 Nobel Laureates in Physiology or Medicine which first introduced him to molecular biology, his transition as a student from Kyoto to UC San Diego on a Fulbright Fellowship (13:32), his post doc work on transcriptional control with Renato Dulbecco (25:33), and his decision to move to the Immunology Institute in Basel, Switzerland (34:35). He then explains how he began doing the research for which he would later be awarded the Nobel Prize (47:24), what it felt like to discover something counter to his expectations (59:37), what subsequently drove him to enter the field of neuroscience (1:08:39) and the recent discoveries he has made there using molecular genetics (1:19:50).