午夜剧场

"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 failure or chance—and the 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 European Parliament. The secretariat of the Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP), which has continued to promote global basic research, also stands along the river in the city center. After conducting research on immunology and allergies at the 午夜剧场 Department of Dermatology and overseeing the promotion of 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 HFSP's international research evaluation and support frameworks.

What constitutes truly interesting, cutting-edge research rather than just "useful" research? HFSP promotes innovative basic research that is intercontinental and interdisciplinary. Supporting young researchers and new research teams under a clear vision, HFSP has produced as many as 28 Nobel Prize winners in its 29-year history. Behind this success lies a soil that changes mindsets at an early stage of a research career and supports that mindset flexibly and over the long term. Receiving 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 HFSP for many years—are 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 accompanied by rigid evaluations. For exhausted researchers to be sufficiently prepared for serendipity, it is also necessary to delve into "subtractive research support"—deciding 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 research-advanced nations, we must find great discoveries. On the occasion of HFSP's 30th anniversary this year, I feel that the "prepared mind" of everyone involved in Japanese research is now being questioned.