20 Facts About Masatoshi Nei

Masatoshi Nei was a Japanese-born American evolutionary biologist.

Masatoshi Nei was born in 1931 in Miyazaki Prefecture, on Kyushu Island, Japan.

Masatoshi Nei received a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Miyazaki in 1953, and published his first article, on the mathematics of plant breeding, that same year.

Masatoshi Nei was associate professor and professor of biology at Brown University from 1969 to 1972 and professor of population genetics at the Center for Demographic and Population Genetics, University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, from 1972 to 1990.

Masatoshi Nei was later an Evan Pugh Professor of Biology at Pennsylvania State University and Director of the Institute of Molecular Evolutionary Genetics, working there from 1990 to 2015.

From 2015, Nei was affiliated with the Department of Biology at Temple University as an adjunct Laura H Carnell Professor.

Masatoshi Nei has developed concepts in evolutionary theory and advanced the theory of mutation-driven evolution.

Together with Walter Fitch, Masatoshi Nei co-founded the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution in 1983 and the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution in 1993.

Masatoshi Nei was the first to show mathematically that, in the presence of gene interaction, natural selection always tends to enhance the linkage intensity between genetic loci or maintain the same linkage relationship.

Masatoshi Nei then observed that the average recombination value per genome is generally lower in higher organisms than in lower organisms and attributed this observation to his theory of linkage modification.

Masatoshi Nei showed that, unlike R A Fisher's argument, deleterious mutations can accumulate rather quickly on the Y chromosome or duplicate genes in finite populations.

Masatoshi Nei later developed another distance measure called DA, which is appropriate for finding the topology of a phylogenetic tree of populations.

Masatoshi Nei developed statistics of measuring the extent of population differentiation for any types of mating system using the GST measure.

Masatoshi Nei developed several different models of speciation and concluded that the reproductive isolation between species occurs as a passive process of accumulation of interspecific incompatibility mutations.

Masatoshi Nei's group invented a simple statistical method for detecting positive Darwinian selection by comparing the numbers of synonymous nucleotide substitutions and nonsynonymous nucleotide substitutions.

Masatoshi Nei conducted statistical analyzes of evolution of genes controlling phenotypic characters such as immunity and olfactory reception and obtained evidence supporting this theory.

Masatoshi Nei was born in 1931 Japan, and his lifelong interest in biology and genetics may have its roots in his upbringing on a farm, in a family of farmers.

Masatoshi Nei was married with two children and two grandchildren, and enjoyed listening to classical music and sculpting topiary.

In 2014, Masatoshi Nei suffered a stroke and moved to New Jersey after retiring from Pennsylvania State University.

Masatoshi Nei died in Morristown, New Jersey on May 18,2023, at the age of 92.