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Round-table talks : Systems and synthesiology−237−Synthesiology - English edition Vol.4 No.4 (2012) Dr. Akira Onoby private companies are similar to Type 2 Basic Research in terms of synthetic activity, public research institutes such as AIST and private companies may have different positions even though the objectives are the same. We are trying our approach while hoping to firmly position the processes of creating systems and products in research.Systemic thinking for achieving the objectiveKuwaharaI agree with your comments overall. I come from a background of electricity. I joined the company to work somewhere between electricity and mechanics. When I entered the company, the word “systems” was not a general term, but I worked on all sorts of systems including chemical plants, batch control of chemical and food products, sequence control, thermal power plants, nuclear power plants, nuclear plant operation training simulators, and production management systems for automobiles, tires, and building materials.For the thermal power plant, the United States was ahead in systems, and Japan was a licensee of the US. Our customer made a request that they wanted to automatize the operation. To learn the technology from the US that was engaging in the challenges in this field, I studied in the US for a year, but things were not that great as expected. What I studied hard was their “failures”. I learned carefully what kind of failures there were in the past, used that experience to automate the Japanese plants, and as a result, Japan became number one in the world in the automation of thermal power plants.The problem was what do you do when the plant undergoes unexpected failure. It can not be fixed by computers and it has to be done by persons. If we all depend upon automation only, we overlook training our operators for such cases. To control the plant during emergency, the basic policy is “stopping” it, but it has to be stopped safely. Accurate decision can not be made if the operators are not trained for such non-computer-controlled emergencies. We learned that the emergency training must be done separately while working on automation.I’ve always felt that such pursuit may lose good contact with society, and that’s not healthy. When I create something valuable to society, I want to write about it in my original research paper, and I hope it is accepted. But the academic society does not often have such a mind to do so.However, Prof. Yoshikawa said, “There is Type 2 Basic Research.” He stated that not only conventional research for elemental technologies but also processes of integrating elemental technologies and manufacturing things are important, and that it was a new kind of basic research. Although such researches were taken lightly in the traditional scientific academy and were considered to be at lower levels, he said that that was not true. When I heard him say so I thought that this is exactly what I wanted. I thought that points of contact with society should be described in research papers, and now I have become the editor-in-chief of Synthesiology to realize this.Today’s science was established over a long period of time. Various kinds of factual knowledge were acquired by observing nature and entities, hierarchizing, and analyzing through reduction to elements. Although this method has been greatly successful in science, looking at the current environmental issues and the nuclear power plant accident, the current science that rests upon reductionism and analysis is insufficient in facing the reality of solving such complex issues. Perhaps, there may also be a problem in the current scientific academies that function only within their finely segmented discipline.In fact, private companies are engaging enthusiastically in “synthesis” and “systems,” but the current science has failed to reach that stage. I thought science should extend to include synthesis and systems. It would be science of designing systems and science of integration and synthesis. These are called Type 2 Basic Research. If AIST works harder in this field, I feel communications with industry people will go more smoothly. I hope a synthetic approach will be recognized as a method of R&D in contrast with an analytic approach.Although development and commercialization that are done Mr. Hiroshi Kuwahara

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