Prologue

About “To protect your loved ones”

January 14, 2024

During my impressionable high school years, I frequently visited Hourai Park in Denenchofu. This was a nostalgic place where my family and I sometimes took walks when I was small, and I could see a pond covered with plants if I let my ball roll down the stairs. By the time I was in high school, I no longer thought of it as a big park, but I used to watch the sun set over the railing of its elevated hillside, and I would get lost in thought. I was especially fond of the red plum blossoms, which stood out crisply in the cold weather and bore small red flowers. Many plants and animals, including birds, protected and cheered me up. This environment seemed to heal my broken heart little by little. In this way, I came to want to protect these plants and animals.

At university, I wanted to do something about “pollution” using my specialty in chemistry, which I fell in love with thanks to the influence of my high school teacher. After that, I wanted to study more about the “environment”, so I decided to go to graduate school and moved to Tsukuba. Here I was able to gain a wide range of experience, including field work. My friends also had various specialties, so we never ran out of things to talk about. I eventually decided that in the future I wanted to become a passionate high school teacher, teaching chemistry and biology while working with children to protect the environment.

Thus, in the second year of graduate school, I took the teaching exam and was making good progress, when suddenly an unexpected event occurred. It was the news that my 18-year-old cousin had leukemia. My mother was the eldest of six children, so I was the oldest of all my cousins, and he was the one I loved the most, so I was speechless. When I learned through a graduate school job posting that a new pharmaceutical company was building a research institute in Tsukuba, my father, who worked for another pharmaceutical company, encouraged me, and I decided to take the employment exam for one of the companies. On the Kanagawa prefectural high school teaching exam, I was selected to have an interview with a principal and also received an early unofficial offer from the pharmaceutical company. After thinking about it until the last minute in March, I declined the offer at the principal’s interview, apologized to the board of education and to the graduate school, and finally joined a company called Fujisawa Pharmaceuticals.

Since joining the company, I had researched leukemia and explained to his aunt about the possibility of a bone marrow transplant for him, but the success rate was low and she finally gave up on the idea. Nevertheless, he studied hard and was admitted to Waseda University, but left this world at the young age of 20. It is hard to describe the feeling of helplessness I felt at that time, but on the contrary, the opportunity he gave me inspired me to devote myself to research in order to create good medicine for people at any cost. As a result, I succeeded in the research and development of an immunosuppressant drug, which was rare in the world at a time when transplantation medicine had not yet been established and resulted in saving the lives of so many people around the world. I was also involved in the clinical development of organ preservation solutions, which I believe I helped to establish transplantation medicine in Japan.

Since then, I have not changed my desire to help people in the medical world, and have developed new genetic diagnostics to select patients who will benefit from a new type of breast cancer drug called molecular targeted drugs, as well as a new test to determine if breast cancer still requires anticancer drugs. I am surprised to realize that I have been in the medical field for 40 years. When my father passed away during this time, I took five years to obtain a doctorate of science and was transferred to the United States in order to leave something behind. When I lost my mother, I also wanted to leave something behind, so I published a book, which I am about to introduce to you, although it took me eight years to finish it. The title of the book is “To protect your loved ones – Let’s use our power to change the history of our planet -” This is a long story, so I would like to end today. Today is the anniversary of my father’s death, and I have decided to start something, although I did not do it consciously.