He didn’t plan on becoming a scientist. But Dr. Joseph Takahashi, Professor and Chair of the Department of Neuroscience at UT Southwestern, went on to discover the gene that controls our biological clock — a breakthrough that changed medicine. His message: stay curious, stay patient, and keep going.
Doctor Joseph Takahashi, unscripted. Doctor Takahashi, tell me your story. When I think about what ignited my passion in science, it actually happened pretty late. Because I didn't realize you could be a scientist until I was a junior in college. The pursuit of knowledge, it's never ending. When you find something new, then it opens up a whole new set of questions. So that's what makes a scientific career so amazing. My father worked for General Douglas MacArthur in the post-war occupation of Japan. He grew up in San Francisco. And my entire immediate family on my father's side was interned after Pearl Harbor, except for my father who was going to Berkeley, he was drafted into the US Army. Which is a little ironic. Your entire family is interned, uh, and then you get drafted. And so that's where Uh, he eventually met my mother, who's Japanese. They were eventually allowed to marry each other, and then I was born in a US Army hospital in Tokyo, Japan. What did your childhood look like? I lived overseas in very exotic places in Burma, Pakistan, and there were just incredible wildlife in both of those locations. One thing in particular that was important for me in Pakistan, one of the hobbies there. is to have pigeons as pets, and so I obtained my first pair of pigeons at the market in Karachi. I would say that was my first foray into genetics. Sort of observing how pigeons bred and what their offspring looked like. Then in my junior year, I had incredible professors at Swarthmore College, and one of them, his name was Kenneth Rawson, he had these electric fish from South America and Africa, but we just put electrodes on the tank and recorded their discharge. If we left the fish alone, we didn't disturb it. In the daytime, it went completely silent. And then at night, it would swim around and discharge all night. And that's actually the beginning of my career in circadian rhythms. Is there a moment in your research journey that reaffirmed why you chose this field? The most important moment in my research career was when we identified the clock gene. You can't have somebody telling you what to do. It has to be inside you to pursue all these problems because doing science is not that easy. Before we identified the gene, everyone was a skeptic. Our paper was published in Cell in 1997. The day that paper came out, the entire The atmosphere changed and that really opened up the field because we could now connect this clock gene and what it did with all other kinds of pathways that are already known that cause diseases, cancer, immune function, metabolism, neurodegeneration. All of these turn out to be related. One of the reasons I came to UT Southwestern is really the atmosphere and the feeling here is different. People care about what you discover. The colleagues are just amazing and you can find a collaborator and expert in almost any aspect of biomedicine. My wife is Carla Green, who's in the neuroscience department, and she also works in the field of circadian rhythm. So I've known her professionally for a very long time. We were married in 2019. Both of us love skiing and hiking, so one of our. My Favorite places is Colorado. For my first marriage, I have a daughter, Erica, and a son, Matthew. My daughter has a doctorate in physical therapy, and then my son works at a scientific support company. Even 40 years later, the work in my lab is super exciting. The clock impinges on almost everything in medicine. It's a story about how Um, organisms adapt to the environment, the 24 hour world. Doctor Takahashi, if you could share one piece of advice with your younger self at the start of your career, what would it be? When you're working on a hard problem, you just need to be patient and persist. It's all gonna work out.
