Susumu ito

Susumu Ito is an American cell biologist. Ito was born in Stockton, California in 1919. He was in auto mechanic school when he was drafted into the military a year before Pearl Harbor. He served in the all Japanese-American 442nd regiment that was the most decorated unit in the U.S. Army during World War II. He was an artillery spotter and rose to the rank of Lieutenant.

Ito’s research career was stimulated by a summer in Woods Hole at the Marine Biological Laboratory in 1951, where he met scientists as Otto Loewi, and particularly Katsuma Dan. He became a professor at the Harvard Medical School Anatomy Department in 1961, where his research centered on ultrastructural (electron microscopic) studies of the gastrointestinal system. In the early 1980s, he and William Silen showed that repair of the mucosal lining of the stomach (“gastric restitution”) is a far more rapid process than previously thought possible. Thomas D. Pollard began his studies of acto-myosin based cell motility as a student in Ito’s lab. Although Ito retired in 1990, he is still active in the lab (2010).

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External Links

WGBH / PBS program about Susumu Ito [1]

"The Long March of a Soldier-Scientist" [2]