I spent a week in Japan for the Japanese Physiological Society Meeting recently. It was in Morioka Japan and I highly recommend the city as an off the beaten trail type of place to go. The area is known for its great noodles, its iron works and the convergence of three rivers from the surrounding mountains. On the mountains, even though it was May, you could see the snow capped peaks. Apparently the emperor has a dacha in the mountains as a place to escape. The city is easy to reach from Tokyo by bullet train; called the shinkansen.

I attended the society meeting and participated in several discussions of the latest science and technology. That is fun and is the attraction to science conferences. I was approached by at least two senior people asking me if there were jobs right for people of their experience in America. The job market in America for scientists is not great I told them. Two colleagues also were heavily marketing their graduate students to me for hiring as postdocs. Right now I employ two postdocs: one Japanese, I am sure she has said nice things about my lab to the people recommending another postdoc, and another postdoc who is Argentinean. My colleagues were telling me that positions for scientist in Japan were very few and it was hard to keep good people. I completely understand and sympathize. I’ve blogged the same musings before: Geeks are an endangered species and Lost Generation. Those blogs discuss the difficulty in educating American students in the science and the fact that my two postdocs are not US citizens is evidence therein.

What appears to be happening in Japan is that the high school education is focusing less on science and technology and more on banking and business. Therefore the best and brightest are not entering the sciences. Sound familiar? I’ve been saying that for years and the Japanese concur.

From what I was able to gather the biggest universities and most established faculty get the big grants because the philosophy is to do BIG science. Big science is where a great amount of resources are thrust to address an important question. A classic example of big science is the human genome project. That obviously was successful and the results are being used by a great number of scientists around the world. But that is a platform for others to make discoveries. What is happening is there are fewer scientists with funding or students to do research to mine the human genome data. This is true for the USA and Japan.

The Japanese government I am told have also done something interesting. The goal of their interesting policy was to encourage students and young faculty to go into and stay in science. So a policy of preferential funding to students and junior faculty was started. Well, there were not enough students going into science to fill the student positions. Plus the experienced faculty who were not doing big science lost their funding. This produced a huge brain, power, and experience vacuum of competent faculty who knew how to manage and mentor students in the labor intensive training environment that students need. Now there are fewer experienced faculty and fewer students. Those students in the system have lost their role models.

This is why the experienced faculty who are my age are losing their funding and trying to convince me to hire them and their students. They are abandoning a sinking ship. While that is just sad, I do not blame them. As I have said in a previous blog the smart scientists have options and will leave when times are tough. It is not a survival of the fittest.