Mori was born in 1958 in
Kurashiki, Okayama. In the elementary school era, he was good at mathematics and
arithmetic, and learned from the newspaper about the existence of
quarks. In the middle school era, he was influenced by the
Nobel Prize in Physics of
Hideki Yukawa, and he decided to study
physics at the Faculty of Science at
Kyoto University (at the time, the golden age of
elementary particle physics). However, he was finally admitted to the Department of Synthetic Chemistry of the Faculty of Engineering at Kyoto University. When Mori was in the first year of college, he did not understand the significant difference between the laws of physics and
chemistry, but he learned about the new development of
molecular biology from newspaper articles. Soon after, Kyoto University alumnus
Susumu Tonegawa made a breakthrough in immunology research (which earned Tonegawa the first Japanese
Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine about a decade later), Mori read about it in the newspaper and was shocked, then he decided to transfer to the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences and continue to pursue graduate studies. In 1985, he obtained a doctorate degree. ==Career==