He was born in Hong Kong on May 11, 1925. He received his bachelor's degree in chemistry from Nagoya University in 1947 from Prof. Fujio Egami. Following two years of post-graduate work with Prof. Louis Fieser at Harvard University, he returned to Nagoya University where he completed his PhD in 1954 with Yoshimasa Hirata.
Career
He took a position as assistant professor at Nagoya, and then professor of chemistry at Tokyo University of Education. In 1963 he moved to Tohoku University in Sendai and remained there until 1969 when he joined the faculty of Columbia University. In 1980 he became Centennial Professor of Chemistry. He was chairman of the Chemistry Department from 1987 to 1990. He was a founding member and one of the six directors of research at the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology in Kenya, the first director of the nonprofit Suntory Institute for Bioorganic Research, Osaka, and he assisted the Brazilian government to set up a center of excellence in the Amazons, the Institute of Medicinal and Ecological Chemistry with its headquarters in São Paulo. In April 2001 he was asked to start a chemistry unit within Biosphere 2, Arizona, operated by Columbia University. His research encompassed isolation, structural and bioorganic studies of bioactive compounds, retinal proteins, interaction between ligands and neuroreceptors, development of various spectroscopic methods, especially circular dichroic spectroscopy. He has published around 750 papers, and authored, co-authored, or edited nine books on spectroscopy and natural products. Koji Nakanishi determined the structures of over 200 biologically active animal and plant natural products, many of which are endogenous and/or the first member of a new class. These include ginkgolides from the ancient ginkgo tree, first insect molting hormones from plants, new nucleic acid bases, insect antifeedants, antibiotics, first meiosis inducing substance from starfish, crustacean molt inhibitors, shark repellents from fish, tunicate blood pigments, brevetoxins from red-tide dinoflagellates, philanthotoxin from a wasp, and the human eye pigment involved in macular degeneration. His studies with retinal analogs and retinal proteins made seminal contributions in understanding the structural and mechanistic basis of animal vision and phototaxis. In 2000, his research group succeeded in clarifying relative movements of the retinal and the opsin receptor throughout the visual transduction process; this was the first such study performed with G protein coupled receptors and contributed in clarifying the mode of action of numerous other GPCRs. It also established the structure and biosynthesis of the fluorescent pigment A2E that leads to the incurable eye disease age-related macular degeneration and its involvement in apoptosis. His spectroscopic contributions included the first applications of the NMR nuclear Overhauser effect in structure determination during the ginkgolide studies, and in particular development of the exciton coupled circular dichroic method, a non-empirical sub-microgram scale technique for determining various aspects of molecular chirality of organic molecules in solution, an extremely versatile technique applicable to compounds ranging from small molecules to various types of ligand/receptor complexes. As of December 2002, approximately 425 students and postdoctoral fellows spent a period of time in his group, i.e., 95 in Japan and 330 at Columbia University. About 140 of his former colleagues hold academic positions at universities.
When Nakanishi appeared at a reception where he was scheduled to receive an award or to present a scientific paper, the audience could most generally expect an added spectacular surprise treat, as Koji was a famous and talented magician. Koji Nakanishi married Yasuko Abe in 1945. They have two children, Keiko and Jun, three grandchildren, Aya, J. Kenji López-Alt, and Pico, and a great-granddaughter. The Nobel Prize winner Satoshi Ōmura was Nakanishi's student at Tokyo University of Education.
