Education
Born and raised in Japan, Kunio Yamazaki received his Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Tokyo in 1970.
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Kunio Yamazaki
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Doctor Yamazaki is most notable for his extensive work with the major histocompatibility complex. He was a senior researcher at the Tokyo Metropolitan Isotope Research Center before coming, in the mid 1970s, to the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research for post-doctoral training in the laboratories of the famous President of Sloan Kettering, Lewis Thomas, and the eminent immunogeneticist Edward Boyse. The first publication to describe this finding (Yamazaki et al, 1976, J Exp Medicine) demonstrated that mice tend to mate with other mice that are different from themselves at the Major histocompatibility complex loci.
This discovery, which has been replicated in a number of other species by other investigators, provides a basis for maintenance of Major histocompatibility complex diversity within a species and likely plays a central role in inbreeding avoidance.
Thus the work has had implications for evolutionary biology, sociobiology and immunology. Following this paper, Kunio and collaborators, who now included Gary Beauchamp at the Monell Chemical Senses Center, proved that urinary odors could mediate discrimination between mice of different Major histocompatibility complex types.
