Interview: Japan needs to reform scientific research system: Riken president

"Japan needs to reform its scientific research system, or it will be degraded to a country with declining scientific research," said Hiroshi Matsumoto, president of Riken, in a recent interview with Xinhua.

74-year-old Hiroshi Matsumoto assumed the position of Riken's president in 2015 after Ryoji Noyori, former president of Riken, quit the job due to a stem-cell scandal in 2014 that largely hurt the reputation of Riken, Japan's largest comprehensive research institution.

Matsumoto said Japan's scientific research institutions and universities are now faced with two dangerous trends.

One is the over differentiation of research fields. "Nowadays, many researchers only know their own fields. They lack motivation to learn more about other fields and seldom communicate with scientists in other areas. Hence they lack a systematic knowledge about science and connections between different fields and have difficulty being creative," he said.

In Kyoto University where Matsumoto was president between 2008 and 2014, professors open over 1,000 courses based on their special research fields. Students could choose freely from these course based on their own interests. But the high degree of freedom could also lead to the undesirable result that students choose courses that cover only a very narrow field and fail to lay solid foundation for their future research due to lack of comprehensive knowledge.

To address the problem, Matsumoto enacted a "literacy reform" when he was president of Kyoto University, which aimed to break the barriers between different fields and provide the students with a general education during the first two years of university.

The other dangerous trend, according to Matsumoto, is an increasingly "utilitarian" tendency among the scientists. Many researchers now are more interested in fields that are "profitable" and anxious to achieve immediate success, he said.

The stem-cell scandal is a typical example, in which Haruko Obokata, a former Riken scientist, allegedly fabricated data and doctored images for her papers on stimulus-triggered acquisition of pluripotency or STAP.

Matsumoto said that to prevent such incidents from happening again, "the fundamental thing to do is to highlight the importance of ethics among researchers."

He also pointed out that research institutions shall not press too hard upon researchers with time limits. "Researchers in most institutions nowadays are hired for a fixed period of time. If they could not make expected achievements within the term, their contract might not be renewed. Some of them might resort to reckless measures."

When Matsumoto was president of Kyoto University, he implemented a "White Brow" project, in which young scientists with potentials were chosen and hired for a period of up to five years. During the five years, the researchers could follow their own interests and bring their initiative to full play, with no need to worry about teaching tasks or performance evaluation.

"A similar project will be introduced to Riken. Since I became president of Riken, one of my first efforts was to reform the personnel system of Riken and to prolong the tenure for researchers, so as to create a more stable and reassuring atmosphere for research," he said.

"For researchers, what they shall always bear in mind is the contribution that their research could make to the society," he added. Endit