Osamu Hayaishi

Osamu Hayaishi was a Japanese biochemist, physiologist and military physician, born on 8 January 1920 in Stockton, California. He completed his medical degree at Osaka University in 1942, served three years as a medical officer in the Japanese Navy, and took his PhD in 1949 after joining the Institute of Microbial Diseases at Osaka University. He worked with Arthur Kornberg at the National Institutes of Health and at Washington University in St. Louis, and in 1955 discovered the oxygenases, a group of respiratory enzymes that catalyse the direct incorporation of molecular oxygen into substrates. He also discovered the sleep-inducing action of prostaglandin D2. He was president of the International Union of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from 1973 to 1976 and received the 1986 Wolf Prize in Medicine, the Asahi Prize, the Japan Academy Prize and the Order of Culture, and was made an honorary citizen of Kyoto. About 600 graduate students trained under him, among them Tasuku Honjo, the 2018 Nobel laureate in medicine or physiology. He died on 17 December 2015.