Brain circulation, not brain drain!

I spent 21 June at the 18th Science in Japan forum, which was held at the Cosmos Club in Washington, DC. The forum’s title was “Chemistry saves the Earth—toward sustainable society” ; its topic, artificial photosynthesis.

Humanity’s consumption of energy is currently running at about 3 × 10²⁰ joules per year. Ten thousand times that amount of energy reaches Earth every year in the form of sunlight. Converting that bounty directly into electrical energy is what photovoltaic cells already do. Converting it into chemical energy is the goal of artificial photosynthesis.

Why bother to mimic plants when we have real plants, which are already being harvested for biofuels, and we have solar cells, which already account for 5% of electricity generation in some countries? For one thing, most of the world’s arable land is already being farmed to produce food. For another, as Haruo Inoue of Tokyo Metropolitan University pithily put it in his talk at the forum, “You can’t fly a jumbo jet on battery power.”

What’s more, the fuels created by artificial photosynthesis will not require radically new technologies to use and handle. The internal combustion engines, gas tanks, and fuel trucks that work for natural gas and oil will work for their artificial equivalents.

The Washington office of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS), which organized the forum, picked the topic, in part, because Japan and the US are in the vanguard of research. Indeed, several speakers cited a 1972 Nature paper by Akira Fujishima of Kanagawa University and Kenichi Honda of Tokyo University as the field’s origin. The two researchers demonstrated how the key step in photosynthesis, the light-induced splitting of water into H₂ and O₂, could be achieved with the help of a semiconductor catalyst.

As I sat listening to the talks, the last files of Physics Today‘s July issue were being sent to the magazine’s printer. Among the news stories in the issue is a report by David Kramer on the state of artificial photosynthesis research. I urge you to read it if you want to learn more about this important field.

Encouraging Americans and Japanese to study abroad

Not all the talks at the JSPS symposium were about photosynthesis. Masuo Aizawa, who advises the president of the Japan Science and Technology Agency , addressed the topic of creating a flexible and sustainable science policy.

Among the challenges that Japan faces is its declining and aging population. Sustaining the country’s science infrastructure entails attracting not only a shrinking pool of young Japanese to careers in science, but also non-Japanese to research positions in Japan. Aizawa and his fellow framers of science policy recognize those priorities and have established an impressive array of initiatives, including the World Premier International Research Center Initiative, or WPI, which Toni Feder wrote about in Physics Today‘s December 2008 issue.

The photo shows me behind the counter of the Genpei sushi restaurant in Sagamihara, Japan. I used to eat there once a week when I was a JSPS postdoc in the late 1980s at Japan’s Institute of Space and Astronautical Science.

But what struck me most was Aizawa’s enlightened view about Japanese researchers going abroad. “It’s not a brain drain,” he said. “It’s brain circulation!”

The trouble is, young Japanese are increasingly reluctant to leave their native country for work or study. The decades-long recession has created a shy, inward-looking generation. As the Economist reported in 2011, whereas just 2% of the science and engineering doctorates awarded in the US in 1997–2007 went to Japanese, Chinese accounted for 28%, Indians 11%, South Koreans 9%, and Taiwanese 7%.

As if to mirror that insularity, Americans are also stay-at-homes. The JSPS has a long-standing and generous postdoctoral fellowship program for foreigners to go to Japan. In 2011 Americans and Canadians together took 11% of the positions, while Europeans took 34% and Asians 45%.

As a supporter of Thomas Jefferson’s assertion that people should be free to pursue what makes them happy, I’m not too bothered if American, Canadian, and Japanese graduate students prefer to remain in their respective countries for their postdocs. But it would be a pity if they made their decisions in ignorance of the professional and cultural rewards of working abroad.