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The Japan Prize has been annually awarded since 1985 to people, regardless of nationality, occupation, race or sex, whose achievements in all categories of science and technology have advanced knowledge and served the cause of peace and prosperity. Each year two fields are designated for the prize, which is accompanied with a cash award of 50 million yen, or about US$450,000.
Prof. Emeritus Gerhard Ertl of the Department of Physical Chemistry at the Fritz-Haber Institute of the Max-Planck Foundation in Berlin, Germany, who received the Japan Prize in 1992, was announced Wednesday as a Nobel Prize winner in chemistry for his studies of chemical processes on solid surfaces. His discovery helped develop technologies of fuel batteries, emission gas filtering as well as findings of ozone layer destruction.
A day earlier, physics Professor Albert Fert of South Paris University and Professor Peter Grunberg were announced as winners of the Noble Prize in physics. The two also had received the Japan Prize in January this year. Their independent discovery in 1988 of giant magneto-resistance was applied in a technological breakthrough in gigabyte hard disks, which is now indispensable in computer data storage.
"This is a dramatic coincidence," said Hiroyuki Yoshikawa, president of the Science and Technology Foundation of Japan, the sponsor of the prize. Yoshikawa, who is responsible for selecting the Japan Prize winners, is delighted that his choices for the 23-year-old prize have also been selected by the century-old, most prestigious prize in the world of knowledge.
In fact, the past four Japan Prize awardees later received Nobel Prizes. "This is a testimony to the Japan Prize's high-level standard of selection," said Yoshikawa, former president of the Science Council of Japan and himself a prize winner for robotics technology in 1997.
Distinctly different from the Noble Prize, which recognizes scientific advances regardless of their applications, the Japan Prize focuses more on their social application and benefits for prosperity and peace through developing knowledge.
But Yoshikawa would like to see a scientific angle to the "dramatic coincidence." He says that scientists are increasingly geared toward social benefits, turning their back away from, say, weapons development. Besides, society is imposing rules and laws upon scientists' activities, such as in cloning technology.
Furthermore, the timing gap between a scientific discovery or invention and its application has become increasingly short, observed Yoshikawa. This year's Nobel recipients are good cases in point, as their discoveries were promptly utilized for gigabyte hard disks or fuel batteries.
The Japan Prize for 2008, for which the selection process is now underway, will be chosen from among scientists engaged in the fields of information communications as well as genome and medical genetics. Considering their wide popularity and applications, the prize recipients may have a better chance of becoming Nobel Prize laureates.
