Previous Fora / 2003
Speakers
Knowledge and science
New situations in science - research fields, disciplines, integration and internationalization
Professor Masao Ito,
Special Advisor, Brain Science Institute, RIKEN, Japan
Abstract
RIKEN Brain Science Institute, Wako, Saitama 351-0198, Japan
In recent years, certain features of science and scientists have drastically changed. For example, firstly research fields are set according to common targets such as information, life, and environments, across many classic disciplines such as physics, chemistry, engineering, biology and medicine. Secondly, borders of classic disciplines have faded out and close interdisciplinary interactions have become essential for any major disciplines. Thirdly, while science began with analysis of nature into its elements and has been dominated by the analytical approach, dominance is shifting toward integration of elements to complex systems. Fourthly, whereas scientific research is increasingly bound to national interest, thus international cooperation is limited by intellectual property right problems, the importance of international cooperation is increasing. Responding to these changes, universities and research institutes have been restructured, and new funding policies have been developed. Here I introduce such revolutionary reorganization of scientific research systems that has been undertaken in Japan and discuss its significance.
1. Priority fields of science
In biomedical research field, for example, several themes have received particular attention being closely related to people's health. Brain is a priority field in Japan for three reasons. 1) Brain science (covering neuroscience and related information science) enables us to identify causes of neurological and psychiatric diseases and brain aging and thereby helps develop new methods of treatment and prevention (protecting the brain). 2) Brain science clarifies how brains develop and learn, and contributes to the improvement of childcare and education (nurturing the brain). 3) Brain science reveals the principles of functional operations of complex circuits in the brain and thereby helps inventions of brain-like computers and humanoid robots (creating the brain). Cancer, genome, regeneration of bodily tissues and allergy likewise receive special support because their progress is essential for improvement of people's health. To promote these biomedical research fields, several research centers were established in RIKEN (Institute of Physical and Chemical Research) in the past six years. Brain Science Institute (BSI) in RIKEN was launched in 1997 and now it contains 46 laboratories dedicated to the above-mentioned three areas and another area for basic research on brain mechanisms (understanding the brain). In BSI, scientists have diverse backgrounds in biology, medicine and information science, are of multinational origins (36 nations) and are dominated by the young generation (average age 34).
2. Fusion of disciplines
The dominance of physics in the 20th century may appear to be replaced by that of biomedicine. However, a new trend is that various disciplines start to contribute to biomedicine as a large common research field. Physics will contribute through the solution of numerous theoretical problems in biomedicine and the development of new types of materials and instruments. To undertake measures that meet this new situation, undergraduate and graduate education must be reformulated in such a way that students are exposed to heterogeneous concepts and technologies. Even life styles of scientists must change so as to facilitate multidisciplinary interaction daily. This may require changes in designs for laboratories, buildings and even the campus. BSI is expected to have close interdisciplinary interactions between information scientists and biomedical scientists, but in reality, this requires constant efforts to reinforce; otherwise, they tend to work separately. Effective programs and facilities need to be developed to facilitate interdisciplinary interactions.
3. Integration in science
Science has involved analyzing nature into its elements. In biomedicine, bodies have been dissected at the organ, cellular and molecular levels. This direction has been taken by many classic disciplines of biomedicine such as anatomy, physiology, biochemistry and pharmacology, and progress in these disciplines has remarkably accelerated in recent years because of technological innovations. Efforts to integrate elements to the whole, namely, from the molecular, cellular and organ levels to functional bodies have also been devoted, but the progress in this direction has been rather slow because of technical and methodological difficulties. Recently, however, computer technology has changed the situation. For example, neuroinformatics aims at synthesizing virtual brains, and imaging technologies allow us to observe activities in a human brain while a subject conducts a psychological task. Thus, integration progresses along the axis of element-to-whole, or microscopic-to- macroscopic. Nevertheless, we used to rarely find a student with an integrative mind, whereas there are numerous students with superb analytical minds. This situation requires a radical reformulation of educational systems similar to that discussed above in connection with fusion of disciplines. Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) to be launched in 2005 is designed with particular emphases on the above-mentioned disciplinary fusion and integration.
4. International collaboration
As a current trend, the world becomes increasingly competitive in industrial development. An excessively rapid introduction of rules for an industrial community into a science community, might inhibit free internal and inter-institutional collaborations and so in a sense limit the progress of basic science. Basic science may largely be in a precompetitive stage, and hence the right for scientists to freely communicate and collaborate must be preserved.
The Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP) is an international funding system launched in 1989 by the initiative of the Japanese government. It provides grants worldwide to research proposals of intercontinental collaborative research. HFSP supports only basic research on complex biological mechanisms, and it is unique in the sense that it does not claim for the intellectual property right.
Comment
The motto of HFSP is intercontinental cooperation, and that for BSI is interdisciplinary and international cooperation and maximum freedom for young researchers. OIST aims at being a highest-standard research institute embodying multidisciplinary fusion and integration in science and at attaining a higher level of internationalization. For example, more than one half of its staff members including researchers, administrators, graduate students and postdoctoral fellows are expected to come from abroad. These are experimental trials seeking for advanced models of research systems and supporting systems, measuring up to the foremost hope of the Japanese society to live in a science & technology-based creative nation.
It is encouraging to see that various initiatives have been displayed in Asia and Oceania, beside Japan, to create advanced scientific research environments. I hope that a synergism of these initiatives raise science to a higher level in Asia and Oceania, and thereby contributes to the worldwide advancement of science and eventually to human welfare.