Japan aims to internationalize its science enterprise

In a bid to attract both global recognition and foreign scientists, last year Japan launched the World Premier International Research Center Initiative, or WPI. For 10 years, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) will pour ¥7 billion (roughly $70 million) annually into five new interdisciplinary institutes in cosmology, materials science, nanoscience, immunology, and the interface of cells and materials.

“Three Japanese scientists won Nobel Prizes this year. This is the kind of achievement [the Japanese government is] seeking,” says University of Maryland biologist Rita Colwell, the former head of NSF and a member of the WPI assessment committee. The initiative is “ambitious, but justifiably so,” she adds. “They are investing in areas of known strength.”

The WPI grew out of a government policy decision three years ago that requires, among other things, that Japan have around 30 world-class research institutions, says Shig Okaya, director of MEXT’s strategic programs division. “We are sending out four times as many people as we import. We are brain-draining rather than brain-gaining. This means we need to establish institutions to attract the topnotch researchers of the world.” The WPI institutes are supposed to have about 30% foreigners among their researchers. That, says Okaya, “is bizarre for Japanese. The WPI is revolutionary. It’s innovative and very flamboyant.”

Global science, top science

“Our main goal is to make really nice science. We also want to foster young research leaders,” says Masakazu Aono, director of the WPI’s International Center for Materials Nanoarchitectonics (MANA). MANA is hosted by NIMS, the National Institute of Materials Science in Tsukuba, and is the only WPI institute not based at a university. “The most important element of nanoarchitectonics,” Aono says, “is to develop novel methods to arrange functional nanostructures in designed patterns and link them to each other in order to have innovative functionality as a system.”

“The demand for innovating materials is getting very high. So we feel we have to open a new paradigm of materials development,” Aono says. MANA will do that, he adds, “by combining the remarkable developments in nanotechnology in the last two decades with novel control technologies.” MANA’s research program is divided into four sections—nanomaterials, nanosystems, nano-green, and nano-bio. The nano-green section, for example, includes work on new types of high-efficiency solar and fuel cells. Among MANA’s research goals are realizing nano-superconductors and developing “nano-brains” as components for next-generation data processing.

To involve scientists who may not want to move to Japan, MANA has satellite labs in the US, the UK, and France. The satellites are small research groups for which MANA provides some funding, mostly for students. Cambridge University’s Mark Welland, who has collaborated with Aono for years and is codirector of the MANA satellites, says the satellites are a way of “looking for opportunities where a combination of their skills and ours can give added value. They substantiate the aspiration to have strong, real international links.”

Jim Gimzewski, a MANA principal investigator and head of a satellite at UCLA, adds, “We are trying to do exciting new research. Bringing together people of different backgrounds—scientific as well as cultural—promulgates new ideas.” MANA, he says, is not like an NSF center of excellence. “[WPI] projects have to have something radically new about them.”

How did the universe start? What is it made of? Where is it going? Those are the big questions that the WPI Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe is tackling, says Hitoshi Murayama, who took a leave from the University of California, Berkeley, to return to Japan as head of IPMU. “Take the question, How did the universe begin,” he says. “We all think it began with the Big Bang. It’s a singularity. General relativity breaks down. That’s where mathematicians come in. They know how to deal with infinities. We hope that by mixing the expertise [of physicists, astronomers, and mathematicians] we might solve the Big Bang.”

As MEXT sees it, IPMU is doing a great job, although like the other WPI institutes, it’s still ramping up. Some of IPMU’s principal investigators are based abroad and do not make long visits to Japan—their job is to provide advice, send over scientists, and help forge international ties. More than half of the 30-plus IPMU scientists on site at the Kashiwa campus of the University of Tokyo are non-Japanese, coming in equal shares from the US, Europe, and other Asian countries.

The other WPI institutes are the Immunology Frontier Research Center at Osaka University, the Advanced Institute for Materials Research at Tohoku University, and the Institute for Integrated Cell–Material Sciences at Kyoto University. All five have different formats, and interactions with their host institutions vary. The common features, which were in part set by MEXT, include using the MEXT funding for salaries and start-up funds, aiming for a total of about 200 people per institute, setting a minimum number of non-Japanese members, and raising additional funds from other sources. Host institutions are expected to provide buildings and other resources. IPMU, for example, is getting a new building and two positions from the University of Tokyo. The MEXT money may be extended to a total of 15 years.

Bending the system

The goal of 200 people came from observing institutions around the world that were inspirations for the WPI. “We wanted our research institutions to be visible, like Stanford’s Bio-X,” says Okaya. Other models include MIT’s Media Lab, the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, British biochemistry institutions, and Germany’s Max Planck institutes. “We see those as topnotch centers of excellence,” Okaya says. “Our hidden agenda is a system renovation of the universities in Japan,” he adds. “Things that happen at the WPI will have a ripple effect.”

English is the lingua franca at the WPI institutes. And, to attract people to them, the seniority-based pay scale typical in Japanese universities has been turned on its head. For example, says Okaya, the director of IPMU earns more than the president of the University of Tokyo. More broadly, salaries at the institute are higher than professors typically earn in Japan, says Murayama. “We pay better to compensate for people [from Japanese universities] losing their pension plans” and to attract foreign scientists.

“To my pleasant surprise, people in their thirties gave up tenured jobs” to come to IPMU, says Murayama. “Because this place cannot offer tenure, the hardest generation to get is in the forties and fifties. Thirties is easier—they are ambitious, they think this is a place they can concentrate on research for 10 years and then go wherever they want. The forties and fifties think ahead, and might be worried about finding another good job. In the late fifties it’s easier, because in 10 years they will retire anyway.”

Mark Vagins is in his early forties, but he jumped at the offer to move to IPMU. He’d been shuttling back and forth between the Super-Kamiokande neutrino detector in Japan and a soft-money position at UC Irvine for years. “I have long believed that discoveries tend to get made where fields collide. It’s very unusual to have pure math people interact with people who build experiments,” says Vagins, who hopes to increase Super-Kamiokande’s sensitivity by adding gadolinium salt to the water to make neutrons visible in a project called GADZOOKS! (gadolinium antineutrino detector zealously out performing old kamiokande, super!). “My guess,” he adds, “is if we achieve the success we are expected to, we’ll be funded. It’s our mission to make it so they can’t pull the plug on us in 15 years.”