The entire nation was elated for two consecutive days in October with the announcements that Japanese scientists had been named winners of Nobel Prizes — Takayuki Kajita in physics and Satoshi Omura in physiology or medicine.
This was in stark contrast with the scandal last year involving Haruko Obokata, then a biologist at Riken (the government-backed Institute of Physical and Chemical Research). She claimed to have developed an easy method called stimulus-triggered acquisition of pluripotency (STAP) to produce pluripotent stem cells. But irregularities were subsequently found in her papers and her alleged discovery eventually proved impossible to replicate.
Both sets of news constitute two sides of the same coin as they represent not only the glory and fall of Japanese scientific research but also the past and present of the circumstances surrounding scientists in this country.