Yasutomi Nishizuka

Yasutomi Nishizuka was a prominent Japanese biochemist, born in Ashiya on July 12, 1932, who made important contributions to the understanding of the molecular mechanism of signal transduction across the cell membrane. He obtained his medical degree in 1957 from the Faculty of Medicine of Kyoto University and completed his PhD in medical chemistry there in 1962 under the supervision of Osamu Hayaishi. After his studies in Japan he spent a year as a postdoctoral fellow in Fritz Lipmann laboratory at the Rockefeller University. In 1977 he discovered protein kinase C, which plays significant roles in many intracellular signal transduction processes. He was elected a foreign member of the Royal Society in 1990 and a member of the Japan Academy in 1991, won the Kyoto Prize in 1992 and was elected to several national academies. He died on November 4, 2004.