Susumu Tonegawa (Nobel Medicine, 1987) worked in the lab of Dulbecco at the Salk Institute in the late 60s. In his autobiography Renato Dulbecco wrote (Translation from page 302 of Dulbecco R. “Scienza, vita e avventura” (Science, life and adventure) Sperling & Kupfer, 1989): "Susumu Tonegawa received the award in 1987 for his amazing work that explained the complex mechanisms that allow the generation of millions of different antibodies from a few hundred genes. He started his speech in Stockholm reading an extract from a letter that I wrote to him around fifteen years before, where I advised him to go to work at the Institute of Immunology in Basel, suggesting that the problems of immunology were ready for a molecular attack. Initially this fact surprised me, but later I understood that with that statement he wanted to emphasize his link with my laboratory".
Susumu Tonegawa:
Thank you so much for the very interesting story about Renato and other great scientists who led the birth of molecular biology in 1960's and 70's, especially the paragraph about me in Renato's autobiography. Yes, this was the first time to read it! He quoted my speech in Stockholm accurately but out of his usual modesty he skipped my next sentence: "I hesitated to take his advice initially because I knew nothing about immunology but eventually I decided to take it because I had admired Renato's broad and pioneering vision about biological and medical research." With respect to the importance of communications among researchers, particularly
the communication between different subfields, as you said, my research benefited enormously through it. Since mid 1990's, as you may know, our lab has made an yet another switch to neuroscience and we have been enjoying it very much:)