Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology

The Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Promotion Corporation (独立行政法人沖縄科学技術研究基盤整備機構, Dokuritsu-gyōsei-hōjin Okinawa Kagaku Gijutsu Kenkyu Kiban Shien Kikō), or OIST, is an Independent Administrative Institution established by the Government of Japan. Its aim is to establish a world-class international graduate university in science and technology in Okinawa. English will be the language of instruction, and a large segment of the faculty and student population will be international. Currently, 24 Principal Investigators and a total of more than 200 scientists, students, and research support staff are located in OIST facilities in Uruma and Onna, Okinawa.

OIST is presently constructing a new permanent campus in Onna village, where there will be a major expansion of research support. The current promotion corporation is supposed to be transformed into the new OIST School Corporation, which will establish and operate the graduate university.

History

In 2001, Koji Omi, who was Minister of State for Science and Technology Policy, and for Okinawa and Northern Territories Affairs at that time, announced the plan to establish an international graduate university in Okinawa. Two years later, it was decided that the university will be located in Onna and four research proposals were selected in order to form the Initial Research Project (IRP), which started in Uruma in 2004. The Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Promotion Corporation (OIST P.C.) was created in September 2005, after the Diet of Japan had approved the OIST P.C. Act in March 2005. The promotion corporation was established in order to prepare the opening of the university. Nobel laureate Sydney Brenner was appointed first president of OIST P.C. in August of the same year.

In March 2007, site preparation for constructing the new OIST campus in Onna Village commenced and one year later, construction work for the center building and the first laboratory building started. The interior fittings of the buildings were completed in March 2010 and most of the research groups moved from the temporary sites in Uruma to the Onna campus.

The Diet of Japan passed the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology School Corporation Act mid-year 2009, thereby laying the foundation for the transition from research institute to graduate university.

Research profile and activities

OIST focuses its research in neurosciences with nearly half of the research units working on neuroscience projects. Currently, these units are:

• Brain Mechanisms for Behavior
• Cellular and Molecular Synaptic Function
• Cellular Mechanisms of Learning and Adaptive Behavior in the Brain
• Computational Neuroscience
• Computational Approach to Mechanisms of the Mind
• Developmental Neurobiology
• Human Developmental Neurobiology
• Information Processing by Life
• Molecular Neurobiology
• Neural Systems and Behavior
• Theoretical and Experimental Neurobiology

OIST has announced to strengthen its position in neuroscience further by commencing non-human primate experiments. The plan to establish a Primate Neuroscience Center at OIST was put forward already in 2007 and the primate facility was expected to be functional in January 2010. Due to financial problems, however, the project has been put on hold for an indefinite time.

The institute is also engaged in cellular and structural biology research. Some of these units are:

• Cellular Strategy for Starved G0 Arrest and Vegetative Proliferation
• Developmental Signaling
• Developmental, Evolutionary, and Environmental Genomics of Marine Invertebrates
• Trans-Membrane Trafficking

In the last Nature Asia-Pacific publishing index, OIST was ranked number 106. Due to its small size and low scientific productivity, OIST has so far not been listed in other international rankings of academic research institutions.

Funding and finances

OIST relies completely on public subsidies paid by the Japanese government despite the fact that the institute is, in terms of legal status, a private company. Sources of external funding have been extremely limited so far. The annual budget for fiscal year 2009 showed direct public subsidies to the amount of approximately 11.3 billion yen (US$ 123 million), but targets for acquisition of external funding (donations, competitive research grants, and sponsored research) were only 55 million yen (US$ 600,000), thus accounting for less than 0.5% of the institute's total expenses.

Since the establishment of the Promotion Corporation in 2005 the institute has received subsidies of more than 64 billion yen (US$ 700 million) with a steady yearly increase (fiscal year 2005: 5.09 billion yen; FY2006: 7.68 billion yen; FY2007: 8.70 billion yen; FY2008: 19.57 billion yen; FY2009: 10.37 billion yen; FY2010: 13.31 billion yen). The original budget for FY2008 approved by the government was 10.7 billion yen, but supplementary budgets of nearly 10 billion yen had to be provided as the estimations made by the OIST management turned out to be unrealistic. For FY2010, OIST requested 14.9 billion yen. For the first time in the institute's history, however, the budget was cut by 11% releasing only 13.3 billion yen. In order to allocate budget to construction activities at the new campus, OIST already cut the research operational expenses in FY2009 by 2.6 billion yen and carried it over to the FY2010 budget. In addition, subsidies provided for operation in FY2010 had been reallocated to facility expenses, thereby reducing the institute's internal research funding by one third.

If the government follows the recommendations of the Government Revitalization Unit, OIST will sustain considerable budget cuts. In the second round of anti-waste screening held in April 2010, the working group responsible for science and technology accused OIST of overspending and found that the institute's budget should be trimmed.

The financial situation of OIST is expected to become even more critical after the transition to the OIST School Corporation is completed, since the OIST School Corporation Act states in article 8 that the government will provide subsidies "for more than one half of the expenses" within the range of its budget , which might be considerably less than requested by the Board of Governs of OIST. The Board stated that high-level of government funding would be indispensable for a long period of time.

Administration and organization

The institute is lead by an Executive Office, which consists of the President, Vice President and Executive Director, and Chief Administrative Officer. Nobel laureate Sydney Brenner is the President and Robert Baughman, a former professor of Harvard University and director at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), serves as Vice President and Executive Director. Jonathan Dorfan was named president-elect of the graduate university. [1]

The Board of Governors (BOG) monitors all actions conducted by OIST and the implementation of strategies. The BOG consists of ten renowned scientists including Nobel laureates Jerome Isaac Friedman, Timothy Hunt, Yuan Tseh Lee, Susumu Tonegawa, and Torsten Wiesel as well as Sir Martin Rees, who is President of the Royal Society. The other board members are Akito Arima, chairman of the Japan Science Foundation, Ichiro Kanazawa, president of the Science Council of Japan, Hiroko Sho, who was professor at the Open University of Japan, and Kiyoshi Kurokawa, who is professor at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies in Tokyo .

Campus

The new Onna campus was opened in March 2010 with a one year delay. It is located on a hillside and surrounded by subtropical forest. The whole campus area covers around 222 hectares with the main campus having approximately 80 hectares. The campus construction project is a joint venture between Kornberg Associates Architects from the U.S., and Japanese architecture and engineering companies Nikken Sekkei and Kuniken. The whole ensemble will consist of the Center Building and three laboratory wings, but currently, only the Center Building and one laboratory building are in operation. Ground breaking for Laboratory 2 will occur in September 2010, and occupancy of the building, housing an additional 16 faculty members and a non-human primate facility, is expected in mid-2012. A search is now under way for the faculty members who will occupy Laboratory 2 [2].

Distinguished faculty

• Sydney Brenner, Nobel laureate (for work with Caenorhabditis elegans), heads the Unit of Molecular Genetics
• Noriyuki Satoh, renowned developmental biologist, who was professor at Kyoto University and now heads the Unit for Developmental, Evolutionary, and Environmental Genomics of Marine Invertebrates
• Mitsuhiro Yanagida, world-renowned cell biologist, who had been working as a professor at Kyoto University on the eukaryotic cell cycle and now heads the Unit on Cellular Strategy for Starved G0 Arrest and Vegetative Proliferation

OIST also finances the work of Hiroaki Kitano, who works for the Sony Computer Science Laboratories in Tokyo and the Systems Biology Institute, and of Igor Goryanin, a systems biologist holding a Henrik Kacser Chair in Computational Systems Biology at the University of Edinburgh. They are adjunct faculty members at OIST.

Public criticism

OIST has been repeatedly criticised for wasting public money. In March 2010, the institute's Board of Governors had to admit that breach of fiscal procedures occurred in the context of the construction work for the new campus site in order to hide enormous overspending. In April 2010, the Government Revitalization Unit, which seeks to trim wasteful government spending, pointed out excesses in operating costs, salaries and meetings of the Board of Governors and concluded that the institute's budget should be decreased. The working group panel also demanded that the management of OIST should be reviewed. The Government Revitalization Unit pointed out particularly that the salary level at OIST is much too high having a value of 132 on a scale where 100 is the average for public servants in Japan. Furthermore, it criticized the high costs for meetings of the board of governors. The cost of one meeting was at 18 million yen (US$ 195,000) and OIST even paid high fees to board members who did not show up but joined via phone.

The issue of wasting money by paying high salaries and fees without getting adequate service in return was already brought up early after OIST P.C. had been established. The Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun found out that Sydney Brenner spent only 63 days in Japan during the first 15 months after his appointment as president of OIST despite being full-time head of the institute and drawing an annual salary of 18 million yen (US$ 195,000).

Regarding the scientific proposals and set-up of the institute, top level scientists in Japan from the beginning warned other researchers about joining a high-risk project at a remote location like Okinawa and expressed their opinion that the whole project might fail after several years. This assessment turned out to be true. Several principal investigators already declined contract prolongation and left the institute because of the unsuitable research environment at OIST. The most prominent among them is Akira Tonomura, a world renowned pioneer in the field of electron holography. He belonged to the group of founding scientists of the Initial Research Project, but after conclusion of the first five years contract, he turned down OIST's offer to renew the co-operation with Hitachi Advanced Research Laboratory in Saitama.

Further issues that have been under public discussion are:

• Unrealistic budget estimates (initially, it was announced that US$ 600 million was sufficient to install a fully functional institute, but having already spent US$ 700 million OIST is still in a fragmentary stage of completion)
• Plans for an interdisciplinary approach in pioneering sciences and technologies have been scaled back to a focus on neurosciences and a few other life science activities that are already well represented by established research institutions like the RIKEN Brain Science Institute and many national universities
• Japan has already three well-established international graduate programs, namely at the Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST), the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST) in Kanazawa City, and the Graduate University for Advanced Studies in Kanagawa Prefecture, so that the OIST mandate seems to be an unnecessary and too expensive project.

External links

• OIST
• OIST promotion video on Youtube