The Soil for Twenty-Eight Nobel Prizes

2019/04/16

"Serendipity favors only the prepared mind." (Serendipity favors only the prepared mind).

It was the French bacteriologist Louis Pasteur who spoke of serendipity—the ability to find great scientific discoveries within failures or accidents—and a university bearing his name is located here in Strasbourg. This small but beautiful city on the border with Germany is home to various international organizations, including the EU Parliament, and the secretariat of the Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP), which has continued to promote global basic research, stands along the river in the city center. After conducting research on immunology and allergies at the Keio University Department of Dermatology and being in charge of promoting research and development for intractable diseases at the Japan Agency for Medical Research and Development (AMED), I have been in Strasbourg since last year studying the international research evaluation and support frameworks of the HFSP.

What is truly interesting, cutting-edge research, rather than just "useful" research? Promoting innovative basic research that is intercontinental and interdisciplinary. Under a clear vision, the HFSP has supported young researchers and new research teams, producing as many as 28 Nobel laureates in its 29-year history. Behind this success is a foundation that changes mindsets early in a research career and supports those minds flexibly and over the long term. Winning an HFSP award is itself extremely prestigious, and wonderful research proposals are sent from all over the world every year.

However, unfortunately, both the number of applications and selections from Japan, which led the HFSP for many years, have been decreasing. While concerns about the relative and absolute decline of Japan's research capabilities are being loudly voiced, the visible countermeasures are simple increases in research funding without flexibility, or the strengthening of research infrastructure and governance with strict evaluations. For exhausted researchers to be sufficiently prepared for serendipity, it is also necessary to delve into "subtractive research support"—determining what is not needed and what does not need to be done.

Precisely because we are in a situation where Japan's advanced initiatives, which have continued since the time of former Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone, are not being fully utilized and we are being left behind by other research-advanced nations, we must find great discoveries. On the occasion of the HFSP's 30th anniversary this year, I feel that the "prepared mind" of everyone involved in Japanese research is now being called into question.