JAPAN NANONET BULLETIN - 75th Issue - July 20, 2006

Managing research projects for the future of nanotechnology
—Leading the establishment of a new study environment based on rich experience—

Dr. Kajimura sees his career as the interesting life of a researcher. He started his career as a researcher after graduating from university, and later made efforts as a project manager at research institutes trying to establish an environment that would allow them to stay competitive globally and their researchers to make most of their abilities. He also transformed the Agency of Industrial Science and Technology, Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) into a new body as its last Secretary and, through thorough discussions, turned its 15 national research institutes into an independent administrative agency. Behind his hard work was his special feeling toward these institutes resulting from his experience as a researcher.

Dr. Kajimura started his career studying superconductivity. In the mid-1960s, amid the emerging trend of scientific knowledge being used for commercial applications, he was more interested in understanding superconductive phenomena than their industrial applications. Later, he joined the Electrotechnical Laboratory of the Agency of Industrial Science and Technology, where he studied thermal fluctuations of electrons in low-dimensional superconductors.

In his early 30s, Dr. Kajimura stayed as a visiting scientist at IBM's Watson Research Center in the United States, where he established the field of phonon echo jointly with American and Norwegian researchers. After returning to Japan, he carried out research on the superconductivity of one-dimensional organic materials to achieve higher superconducting transition temperatures through molecular designs based on a new theory. At that time, Dr. Kajimura was trying to measure the tunneling effect to determine local electronic states of organic superconductive molecules.

In 1981, Dr. Kajimura attended an international conference where his attention was drawn to research on an analytical method for ultrafine areas presented by Dr. Gerd Binnig, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1986. Dr. Binnig's team made it possible to measure tunneling current at any given position of a sample by controlling very precisely the distance between the sample and a metal probe with a sharp tip, without the use of insulator film. Dr. Kajimura says, “When I asked Dr. Gerd Binnig at the conference whether his method would enable observation of atoms, he said, after a long silence, that it could. I was told later that his team had been developing a scanning tunneling microscope (STM) at that time and that they had been about to capture atom images with their new microscope.” Several months later, the team announced that it had succeeded in observing steps between atom layers on the surface of a gold single crystal with the STM. “When I heard the news, I convinced myself that direct observation of nanostructures or electronic states would be indispensable in physics, chemistry, biology, precision engineering and electronics,” Dr. Kajimura says. That was some 25 years ago.

Dr. Kajimura wanted to develop an STM, an analytical instrument he had been looking for, in Japan, so he asked colleagues at his research institute, precision machinery manufacturers and analytical technology firms to join a project to develop STMs. He started a working group jointly with more than a dozen Japanese companies and, one and a half years later, they developed the Japan’s first STM, which showed the array of atoms of the layered material NbSe₂. His group made public all technology and know-how accumulated through the development of the STM. Dr. Kajimura says, “Excellent products cannot be developed as long as their rudimentary technology is owned exclusively by a limited number of people. Such basic technology must be shared widely to help others create technological innovations or new scientific fields.”

Researchers from various fields joined Dr. Kajimura to start an STM workshop for discussing what STMs should be in the future. These participants contributed to initiating a wide range of nanotechnology projects in Japan in late 1980s. The Atom Project of MITI (now, the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, METI), for instance, can be positioned as a project aimed at developing key technologies in the present nanotechnology. The project was designed to put emphasis on the so-called “bottom-up approach” and on collaboration among the government, academia and industry.

Dr. Kajimura had been facing various challenges throughout his career. “The way that research projects are conducted at national institutes is different from how other government officials do their jobs. There were too many restrictions to conduct research freely and effectively at these national institutes. Transforming these institutes into independent administrative agencies was one way to help government researchers carry out their studies smoothly,” he says. Dr. Kajimura began a career as a professor at the Cooperative Graduate School, University of Tsukuba, to study semiconductor surfaces as well as the leaders of high-temperature superconductivity and other research projects as a government researcher. Later, he was appointed as Director-General of the Electrotechnical Laboratory and the last Secretary of the Agency of Industrial Science and Technology, the top administrator of the country’s industrial technology. He stepped down as agency chief after reorganizing the agency’s 15 national institutes into the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), an independent administrative agency. This drastic reorganization was conducted to secure the freedom of research amid a trend of serious attention to nanotechnology, life science and other fields.

Dr. Kajimura puts more emphasis on the results of individual members’ work and abilities than on their aggregated results as a group. Throughout his career as the head of various organizations, he has advised about half of his research staff to withdraw from their studies after careful evaluation. Based on his experience, he offers young researchers advice that may make him sound a bit bitter. “When young researchers are interested in a new field, they tend to overextend themselves. Before expanding their efforts, they should concentrate on their initial studies until they reach a definitive conclusion. Reaching their initial goals is ideal. However, even if they fail to achieve their goals, they need the ability to judge their research works objectively. If they judge that now is the time to give up on their studies, they should stop. Making such a judgment is harder than continuing a project,” Dr. Kajimura says. He adds, “I am confident that I have been saying what I have to express either as a researcher or an administrator and that I am willing to accept how descendants will judge my words and deeds.” Dr. Kajimura is still enthusiastic about his activities in research fields in which nanotechnology can be applied to life science.