We were honoured yesterday to host Professor Masashi Yanagisawa, who delivered our 2024 Burdon-Sanderson Prize lecture. Professor Yanagisawa spoke about ‘Deciphering the mysteries of sleep: toward the molecular substrate for “sleepiness”.
Professor Masashi Yanagisawa, MD, PhD, is Director of the International Institute for Integrative Sleep Medicine at the University of Tsukuba.
As a graduate student at University of Tsukuba, Professor Yanagisawa discovered endothelin, a potent vasoconstrictor peptide from vascular endothelial cells. After moving to the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, he discovered that orexin deficiency causes the sleep disorder narcolepsy, opening a new avenue in sleep research which led to a better understanding of sleep/wake switching mechanisms in the brain. Recognising that the fundamental mechanism for sleep homeostasis remains a mystery, in 2010 he embarked upon a project which has recently led to identification of several new genes that are important to the regulation of sleep amounts and the level of sleep need.
Professor Yanagisawa is the recipient of many honours, including The Asahi Prize and The Keio Medical Science Prize (2018). He was named a Person of Cultural Merit by the Government of Japan (2019) and received the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences (2023).
For several years now the Department's Cardiac Centre has hosted a series of lectures in honour of the English Physiologist, John Burdon-Sanderson, after whom the Cardiac Centre is named.
Sir John Scott Burdon-Sanderson was born in 1828 near Newcastle upon Tyne to a well-known Northumbrian family. In 1871, Burdon-Sanderson reported that Penicillium inhibited the growth of bacteria, an observation that placed him amongst the forerunners of Alexander Fleming. In 1882 he was then appointed as the first Waynflete Professor of Physiology here at Oxford. In the same year he was awarded a Royal Medal by the Royal Society in recognition of his research into the electrical phenomena exhibited by plants, the relations of minute organisms to disease, and of his services to pathology and physiology. A year later, under Burdon-Sanderson's direction, the Department of Physiology was established at Oxford. In 1895, Burdon-Sanderson was appointed Regius Professor of Medicine here at the University.
