UH Manoa
2023 was set to be a big year for Dr. Ryuzo Yanagimachi. Known as the "Father of IVF," and the founder of The University of Hawaiʻi John A. Burns School of Medicine's Institute for Biogenesis Research, Dr. Yanagimachi was honored with the prestigious Kyoto Prize in Biotechnology and Medical Technology.
Presented by the Inamori Foundation, the Kyoto Prize is Japan's highest private award for lifetime achievement in the arts and sciences. It is known as the Japanese equivalent of the Nobel Prize. The Inamori Foundation visited Hawaiʻi to produce a celebratory video ahead of the award ceremony in November.
Sadly, Dr. Yanagimachi died a month after reaching his 95th birthday and received the Kyoto Prize posthumously.
Kyoto Prize recipients deliver speeches at three different venues as a part of the honor. The first event is a grand ceremony in Kyoto, where the honorary president of the Inamori Foundation, Princess Takamado, is present. The second speech takes place at the University of Oxford, and the final one occurs at the University of California, San Diego. The audience at UCSD consists of 200 high school students from the local area and Tijuana, Mexico, who are interested in science.
Dr. Steven Ward, who was recruited by Dr. Yanagimachi and has served as the IBR director since 2009, spoke on his mentor's behalf.
"I had known the man for 28 years and worked side by side with him every day for 23. He had 50 years of science and published 400 papers," Dr. Ward said. "I could have spent a week talking about what he did and what he contributed to the field."
Tasked with condensing decades of breakthroughs into one speech, Dr. Ward instead remembered his mentor with an oral history comprised of personal stories and information gleaned from "Life in Science" articles Dr. Yanagimachi was asked to write over the years.
"Yana was famous enough that people wanted to know his life story in written print. You don't see this very often," Dr. Ward said. "Those were really interesting because I got a real insight into why he was doing experiments."
IVF Wasn't Intended for Clinical Breakthroughs
One of the biggest surprises may be that Dr. Yanagimachi's reason for exploring IVF was not related to helping people have babies.
Dr. Ward said: "He will admit this at the beginning. He simply wanted to see the process of fertilization under the microscope, and you couldn't do that inside the animal. So you had to develop in vitro fertilization, the ability to watch the sperm fertilize the egg in the test tube. Now, he very quickly understood the implications of this. He worked with a man in Australia to get a human sperm to fertilize a human egg in the test tube, but his reason for doing it was purely to study the fertilization process itself."
Yanagimachi's Work Pulled the Medical School from the Brink of Closure
In 1999, the UH Faculty Senate voted to merge the medical school with the School of Public Health.
"When I moved here in 2000, they were talking about closing the medical school. Then Yana's cloning stuff came up and lit the world on fire," Dr. Ward remembers.
"It pushed Governor Cayetano to try to develop what we have now in Kakaʻako. He had this dream of developing a research triangle park where people would love to come to Hawaiʻi to do research. All of that came about because of Yana's acclaim for cloning. He cloned 50 mice, and he cloned clones of clones. That brought fame to Hawaiʻi as a biomedical research center, and all the talk about closing the school disappeared. They hired Dean Edwin Cadman, who came in and built Kakaʻako. Yana probably saved the medical school."
Yanagimachi Gave Researchers Freedom
Dr. Ward says that brilliant mentors will allow their young researchers to generate their own ideas. Dr. Yanagimachi fostered that belief in the IBR after his mentor, MC Chang, extended that opportunity to him.
"MC Chang assigned Yana a project and told him, 'This is your bread and butter. You will do this three days a week, but you can do whatever you want on the other two days of the week.'"
In turn, Dr. Yanagimachi gave his people freedom.
"Teruhiko Wakayama saw this cloning, he thought, 'we can do this better. Instead of electrifying the nuclei to go together, we can inject it.'" Dr. Ward said. "That's now our method, the Honolulu method. He brought Yana the world's first cloned mouse, and Yana's first reaction was, 'We don't do cloning here,' but then he quickly recanted and saw that it was going to be something, so he accepted it. All of this came to be because he gave his postdoctoral fellows the freedom to do it. As a postdoc, he learned the value of giving researchers their freedom. He paid it forward, resulting in his postdoc bringing him fame."
Importance of Oral History
Dr. Ward's oral history of Dr. Yanagimachi's accomplishments was well-received by the students at UCSD to the extent that formats may be changed for future Kyoto Prize awardees.
"The dean of the medical school said, 'You know, that was such a great talk. Maybe, instead of having The laureates come and give talks, we should always have somebody else talk about the laureates,'" Dr. Ward said.
As JABSOM continues to mourn the loss of our pioneer, Dr. Ward would like to continue passing along the history of one of the most influential scientists at the University of Hawaiʻi.
"There are certain things you'll never get written down that you only have from these oral histories. So it's important for people to talk to each other. It's important for the younger generation to talk to the older scientists in the community so that they get those things that are never written down."
The Institute for Biogenesis Research on the campus of UH Mānoa will officially be renamed the “Yanagimachi Institute for Biogenesis Research” (YIBR). A symposium in his honor will also be held in the months to come.