Interviews

1. Difference between experiences of youth and older people in WWII camps

2. His experiences in Chicago after WWII

3. Finding a way to keep donor kidneys longer in order to ship to matched patients

4. Creating a registry to study the outcome of transplants

5. Using tissue typing and blood tests to determine paternity

6. Developing the tray used in determining HLA types for tissue typing

7. The HLA and transplantation history books

8. Developing the micro test was the most important accomplishment

9. Continuing to work to improve transplanting success

Terasaki,Paul

(b.1929) Pioneer medical researcher in tissue transfer and organ transplantation.

Using tissue typing and blood tests to determine paternity

The story is that this was just a routine paternity test. The only difference was the twins were dizygotic twins, meaning that they’re not identical twins. And when we testing them, they were strange because he was probably the father of one child but not the father of the other child.

So my first thought was that somebody mixed up some test tubes in the lab. So we called the mother and asked her, “Please come in. We seem to have some kind of mistake here. We want to test everybody again.” And she said, “I have a better idea.” So instead of coming into bleed everybody, she brought in another man. And this other man turned out to be the father of the other twin and not the father of the first twin. So it became obvious that one father was father of one twin, and the other man was the father of the other twin. It couldn’t have been any other way.

And again, something like this could not have been discovered by the old system. Only by HLA¹ typing, a very polymorphic system, that we could pin that down. And we published that in the New England Journal of Medicine². I think in history, it’s been shown before. There was a case in Germany where one dizygotic twin was obviously from an African American and the other was white. So they were pretty sure that something like this can happen. But our case was the first one shown by tissue typing and blood test.

So then after the publication, the news media came to UCLA and wanted me to tell them about the mother, and I told them that this was all confidential. I can’t do anything. So what they did was they announced it on television and talked about the case and asked the mother come in. And the next day the mother showed up and talked about her adventures. So it was very surprising that she wanted to be on TV.

1. HLA is the acronym for human leukocyte antigen, a genetic maker found on cells of the body that determine white blood cell types. The HLA system is used to assess tissue compatibility for organ transplantation and platelet transfusion. There are over ten thousand HLA types.

2. P. I. Terasaki, D. Gjertson, D. Bernoco, S. Perdue, M. R. Mickey, J. Bond, 1978, “Twins with two different fathers identified by HLA,” New England Journal of Medicine, volume 299, P. 950.

Date: February 10, 2004

Location: California, US

Interviewer: Gwenn M. Jensen

Contributed by: Watase Media Arts Center, Japanese American National Museum.

Interviewee Bio

Paul Terasaki, born in 1929, is a UCLA Medical Professor Emeritus and a pioneer in tissue transfer research who continues to speak globally on tissue typing and organ transplantation. In 1991 he edited a volume entitled History of Transplantation: Thirty-five Recollections.

He and his wife Hisako, a renowned painter, take a strong interest in U.S.-Japan relations and the affairs of the Japanese American community. Together they established an endowment at the UCLA Asian American Studies Center to fund fellowships for UCLA graduate students from Japan pursuing research on the historical and contemporary experiences and issues of the Japanese American population. Additionally, a Paul I. Terasaki Endowed Chair in U.S.-Japan Relations supports a distinguished teaching program designed to bring experts in the field of Japanese studies and U.S.-Japan relations to UCLA. (February 10, 2004)