Biography | Shinya Yamanaka — The Kusunoki Campus Where He Took the M.D.

People assume the iPS story starts in a Kyoto lab. It starts with a medical degree on this hospital campus at 7-5-1 Kusunoki-cho, Chuo-ku, Kobe. Shinya Yamanaka was born on 4 September 1962 in Hiraoka, now the Hiraoka district of Higashiōsaka. His father ran a small factory making sewing-machine parts and told him to become a physician rather than take over the shop. He left Tennōji High School attached to Osaka Kyoiku University and entered Kobe University School of Medicine. The M.D. was awarded here in March 1987. The Faculty of Medicine still sits on the Kusunoki campus beside Kobe University Hospital, a different hill from the Rokkodai main campus that most visitors photograph. He then spent two years as an orthopedic resident at the National Osaka Hospital. Supervisors found him clumsy in the operating room. Some used a pun on his name that meant obstacle. That failure is what sent him toward a Ph.D. in pharmacology at Osaka City University, completed in 1993, and then out of the clinic. A common summary credits Osaka City University with the medical degree. The M.D. is Kobe. Osaka City is the doctorate. The pin is the public medical campus, not a private house. Living-person rule: the published degree year and the buildings a visitor can stand in. Photo: Bittercup, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait: National Institutes of Health, public domain.