[In Context] Takeshi Iwatsubo: a pioneer in Alzheimer's disease research

When he was a medical student at the University of Tokyo in Japan, Takeshi Iwatsubo visited the neuroanatomy laboratory. “I hardly understood anything”, he says, “but I was told to look at human serial brain sections to get an idea about how the human brain is organised. I was invited to visit the lab anytime.” Those visits, he says, were a defining moment in his career. Iwatsubo was a professor of neuropathology at the University of Tokyo until this spring, and is now Director of the National Institute of Neuroscience, at the National Center of Neurology and Psychiatry, where he has a special interest in neurodegenerative disease research, particularly in Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease.