Shigekazu Nagata
Shigekazu Nagata (Japanese长 田 重 一, Nagata Shigekazu; * 1949 in Ishikawa Prefecture ) is a Japanese molecular biologist, who is best known for research on apoptosis.
Nagata studied from 1968 at the University of Tokyo, where he received his doctorate in 1977. Subsequently he was a post-doctoral researcher at the Institute of Molecular Biology, University of Zurich with Charles Weissmann. From 1982 he was assistant professor at the Institute of Medical Science, University of Tokyo. 1987 to 1998 he was Head of the Molecular Biology Department at Osaka Bioscience Institute. From 1995 he was professor of genetics at the University of Osaka ( first at the Medical School, from 2002 at the Graduate School of Frontier Biosciences).
Nagata is known for the study of the mechanism of apoptosis.
In 1980 he was involved in the early cloning of interferon- alpha (amongst others with Charles Weissmann ), which enabled by incorporating the isolated genes in bacteria whose mass production.