Noyori Summer School 2011

On the 9^th-10^th of September I went along to a conference called the Noyori summer school in Kobe. I was pretty excited to be attending. For one it is my first conference since starting my PhD, and in fact my first real conference. I spent a good deal of time working on my poster, I wanted to leave a good impression.

The conference itself was set up to allow all the other IPA’s (the exchange program I’m part of) from all over Japan to meet each other and share their research. In fact I’d say 90% of the other IPA’s are based in Wako campus Tokyo. Talking to them it seems that Wako is set up a lot better to handle overseas students than Spring8, our international relations office is none existent.

Also as part of the program we would be hearing from some of the RIKEN exec about their experiences working for RIKEN and science in general. As well as this we would be getting some site tours of the facilities in the surrounding Kobe area. Also there would be a Q&A session with the President of RIKEN, Noyori-Sensei.

 

Noyori-sensei was actually very interesting and the Q&A session was very enlightening. Admittedly he had his own agenda and rather than answering the questions he was asked he twisted them to suit what he wanted to say. I think it may just be a bitter though as I didn’t really get satisfactory answers to the questions I asked.

Anyway what he had to say was interesting and somewhat surprising. In  a country that prides itself on it’s ability to function without external input he was advocating the need for heterogeneity. His belief was that science in Japan is beginning to stagnate due to the lack of mixing with other societies, cultures and ways of thinking. “No country can survive on its own” to quote the man directly.

Riken now has representatives from over 50 different nationalities although it still has a long way to go to catch up with the rest of the world. Looking around I would say half of the 70 students in attendance were Japanese nationals and the vast majority of IPA’s were from Asian countries. In fact only myself and two others were European and there was nobody in attendance from the America’s .

Noyori-sensei’s next big surprise was his strong promotion of individuality in research. To be truly creative in your scientific ideas and research you must be prepared to take your own path. To paraphrase he said that a truly good idea is not one that everyone likes but in fact the one that everyone criticizes.

Why was this an odd statement? Well I’ll share with you an ancient Japanese proverb.　“出る釘は撃たれる”meaning ‘the stake which sticks out is hammered down’. Not so promising for those with individualistic ideas ey.

I think this is something many Japanese youths going into science struggle with. They are taught from an early age to be subservient to their superiors, follow the rules unbendingly and so on. This does not promote good science and if you are conditioned in such a way I think it would be very difficult to ‘think outside the box.’ I am actually quite glad after hearing this to have grown up in a place where the ability to express oneself as an individual is not only encouraged but lauded. This kind of thinking comes naturally to me and I am thankful for that.

As I said It was interesting to hear this from the mouth of the President of the whole of RIKEN, at least for me anyway. Japan can be a tough place to do science due to the very imposing nature of it’s legislation and a very tight adherence to the rules, I’m glad the big boss man at least agrees with this.

The rest of his talk was very much about the role of science in society. In fact he mentioned that the social sciences and public opinion should be playing a greater role in scientific policy. What is the point in performing society that doesn’t benefit the people?

I guess I can kind of agree with this, although my work is pretty abstract. It is important not to lose sight of the great goals of your research, you can so easily get bogged down in the minor detail that you forget why you even began carrying things out in the first place. A constant dialogue between science and the public is not only important, but necessary. I can totally agree on this point and it is why I really want to become involved more heavily in scientific communication.

Ok his final points were obviously concerned with science and it’s role in natural disasters and the current energy and environmental crises the world is faced with. This is clearly a hot topic in Japan right now after Sendai, it has really permeated all aspects of life out here. Particularly as Japan is a country with very few natural resources, they import over 95% of their fossil fuels, the damage to their nuclear power has hit very hard.

Anyway enough of that for the now I think it’s time to talk a bit more about the event itself. As I said earlier it was really interesting. It was great to hear from other IPA’s about their backgrounds and experiences in Japan. I think the main goal of the conference was just to allow us to get to know one another as the subject areas were so broad that it was difficult to find overlap in our projects.

That being said I did meet some very lovely people and it being a science conference we had a lot in common. We spent most of the day on site tours of the various facilities around Kobe including the center for developmental biology (CDB) and the new K super computer.

I’d visited the CDB once before and was hoping to get a better look inside. Sadly it was not to be. Whilst the person heading the tour, an America researcher whom had actually started out his career in Japan translating scripts for Sega,  was very interesting we were very limited on where we could go.

Sadly I’ve seen the average biology lab many times and I would have like to see some of the support facilities, like their electron microscope and mass spectrometry facilities. There is some very interesting research in evolutionary development being carried out in the center, exploring how the jaw developed, the turtle shell evolved, and other such quirks of nature came about. It’d be nice to fnd out a bit more of that research I think. All in all by the end of the trip I was very jealous of the facilities, it’d be nice to work on something a bit more biological but this is the path I’ve chosen for myself. Maybe after four years.

The K computer, whilst impressive, was still just a giant computer. Essentially a massive server room with a highly advance cooling system. The name it’s self comes from the Japanese symbol meaning 10 quadrillion. This refers to the fact that it has the capacity to process at a speed of 10 petaFLOPS (or floating point operations per second). I’m not going to lie I understood very little so my interest wavered at that point.

It was a very good experience at the end of the day. I got some excellent practice presenting my poster and gabbing about science, one of my favorite pastimes. Also presenting to Noyori-sensei was a fantastic opportunity and he really has piqued my interest, I’d like to here some more talks from him. Sadly my poster didn’t win any prizes, something I need to work on, but it did at least garner some interest.

Of course the best part was meeting other young researchers. It can be difficult at times when people ask you what you do to explain it in a way that is both un-patronizing but also easily understood. Here there was none of that and instead was a good chance to unwind with some fellow researchers, share our experiences of Japan so far and of course teach each other bad words in our respective languages.

Sore ja minna-san.