[전쟁과 경영] Japanese Nobel Prize
Shukuro Manabe, a professor at Princeton University in the United States, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics on the 5th (local time). He was the 25th Japanese-born Nobel Prize laureate for science and was awarded in recognition of his contribution to global warming research. [이미지출처=EPA·연합뉴스]
[아시아경제 이현우 기자] As Japan produced the 25th Nobel Prize laureate in science, criticism of the Korean scientific community is pouring out again, saying that it is the result of insufficient investment in basic science. The criticism that there are not as many Nobel Prize winners as in Japan is repeated every year because they focus only on applied science with high practicality and neglect basic science.
However, in the international community, Korea is regarded as one of the countries that invest the most in basic science. In the national competitiveness data of the Swiss Institute of International Management (IMD) released in June, Korea’s scientific infrastructure ranked second after the United States. It is much higher than Japan, which is in 8th place. It surpasses Japan in all scientific infrastructure indicators, including the number of R&D researchers per 1,000 population and total R&D investment as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP).
Foreign scientific circles describe South Korea’s hopes of winning the Nobel Prize in Science as excessive impatience. Japan’s first Nobel Prize for Science was awarded in 1949. Considering that more than 80 years have passed since the Meiji Restoration in 1868, Korea, where scientific research began in earnest in the 1970s, has a very short history of basic science to expect a Nobel Prize.
In fact, Japan is a country with a much faster starting point than Korea in the field of science. Hideki Yukawa of Kyoto University, who gave Japan the first Nobel Prize in Physics in 1949, was awarded for the discovery of the meson theory related to fission phenomena. He was able to discover this theory because he continued his research from the nuclear weapons development project that the Japanese imperialists secretly pursued before and after the outbreak of the Pacific War.
The reason why there were five winners of the Physiology or Medicine award in Japan is also considered to be due to the great development of Japanese medicine since the early 20th century. In 1905, during the Russo-Japanese War, 30,000 soldiers died from beriberi, a symptom of vitamin B deficiency, and since then, Japan has been investing in medicine and pharmaceutical technology. Japan’s basic science, which has already competed with Western powers since the 1940s, and Korea’s, which has just started, cannot be placed on the same line.
It is said that in the early days of the Meiji Restoration, Japan also went through a lot of trial and error and built up basic science. 150 years of misinterpreting and misinterpreting the English word science to the extent of translating it into ‘science’, a word that used to refer to an exam in the past, has led to Japan’s Nobel Prize for 150 years.
No matter how much growth promoters are applied, just as we have to wait until autumn to harvest rice, I think we should give the scientific community time to grow first before criticizing it.
Reporter Lee Hyun-woo knos84@asiae.co.kr
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