Japanese Scientist That Inspire Me

Just a few days ago, on 1st October 2018, a Japanese immunologist from Kyoto University had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine. His name is one of the things from him that inspires me, Tasuku Honjo, because it sounds Japanese which is kind of cool and it is Japanese. He himself is Japanese but he did show the whole world that he can also make a colossal breakthrough by discovering a therapy that can treat cancer using inhibition of negative immune regulation, hence break the stereotype of Nobel Prize can only, usually and most probably, received by Western people.

Proud as an Asian! As well for him. Speaking of which, Tasuku Honjo discovered a protein on immune cells and eventually revealed that it also acts as a brake on the immune system, after he explored its function. According to the article written by Denise Grady on The New York Times, Honjo showed that specific proteins can limit the immune system's T-cells ability to attack cancer cells.

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By suppressing those proteins, our body would be able to fight cancer.

Honjo discovered a checkpoint, which the body uses to shut down the cells when it needs to stop them, on T-cell molecules called PD-1. Cancer can lock onto these checkpoints to prevent T-cells from fighting the disease. This discovery indeed help develop drugs that stop these checkpoints from working, hence allowing T-cells free to fight cancer cells. Whatever its mechanism is, I feel excited and inspired because cancer can be treated! Cancer undeniably is the serial killer number one that challenges our health nowadays and has been a burden of the medical related profession since it is incurable until before recently, Honjo gave a beacon of hope to the medical field and broke the skepticism of the immunotherapy by the public.

Another quality of him that inspires me is that he is full of curiosity and compassionate. Honjo, after witnessing a medical school student died from stomach cancer, decidedly began his research on cancer, and he said: 'I want to continue my research, so that this immune therapy will save more cancer patients than ever.' Since I was small, I had been taught that cancer is fatal, thus I actually have a dream to pursue my studies on oncology, hoping that one day I could find a cure for cancer. Glad to hear that Tasuku Honjo precedes me. Since I was small, I was taught that it is impossible to cure cancer, but then I am proven wrong by Tasuku Honjo. He inspires me that we should not give up on what we want to do, and by that, we can turn anything impossible to everything is possible, besides personally having an affection for the study of cancer and oncology. Last but not least, his humbleness also inspires me which we can see from what he said. He was approached by a fellow golf player at the golf club one day, who thanked him for the discovery that treated his lung cancer. 'He told me, 'Thanks to you I can play golf again', 'Honjo said. 'It was a blissful moment. A comment like this makes me happier than any prize.' Anyway, Tasuku Honjo truly inspires me and I hope one day I can say 'Arigatou gozaimasu' to him.