Tokyo

The older you are, the more funding you get, according to figures released earlier this year by Japan's highest science and technology body, the Council for Science and Technology Policy (CSTP).

Now the CSTP has set up a committee to debate what measures, if any, should be taken to redress the balance and increase financial autonomy for young researchers. It is scheduled to report back in March.

Uneven: grant funding in Japan by age for 2001. Credit: SOURCE: CSTP

The figures were compiled from all seven of Japan's grant-giving agencies for the fiscal year 2001; the first time such a complete survey has been done. They reveal a marked imbalance, showing that 71% of the money goes to researchers aged 45 or over, with those over 50 getting more than half of all grant funding.

The issue isn't confined to Japan: figures released last year by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) revealed that principal investigators aged 40 and under got only 16% of the 6,961 competitive research grants that it awarded in 2001.

For some, this pattern is out of sync with the age at which researchers are most productive. “We need to shift more funds to those younger people,” says Masahiko Aoki, an economist at Stanford University and a special adviser to the CSTP's review committee. He points to data on the CSTP's website that suggest that most Nobel laureates do their prizewinning research in their thirties.

But Japan's bureaucrats are not convinced. An official at the education ministry says that thanks to programmes set up five years ago, 28% of the ministry's grants for 2001 went to researchers under 40. Even officials at the health ministry, where only 2.4% of last year's 1,400 grants went to researchers under 36, were unconcerned. The ministry's grants are “mission-oriented” and not intended “to give young people funds to be creative with”, says one official.

Hiroo Imura, chairman of the CSTP committee and the former president of Kyoto University, sees the real issue as whether a small, established group of older scientists gets too much funding. “We think it's important to avoid giving several government grants to a handful of researchers,” he says.

Immunologist Kimishige Ishizaka, who is another adviser on the CSTP committee and was formerly at the La Jolla Institute for Allergy and Immunology in California, blames both universities and funding agencies for this effect. Neither steps in to ensure that researchers are not overextending themselves or duplicating research, he says.

But like Aoki, Ishizaka thinks that the real problem is that young researchers cannot be independent, and he blames Japan's brief application forms, which usually describe a research plan in just two pages. “You can't tell what's unique or how the proposed project compares to others,” he says. “It's impossible to evaluate on this basis.” So decisions are based mainly on past records, which favours older researchers, Ishizaka explains.

Although figures show that Japanese under 40 are relatively successful at getting grants (27% compared with the NIH's 16.3%), the average grants are only 33–50% as large as those received by their older colleagues. Ishizaka says that Japan should break down some of its larger projects and spread out the money because the grants awarded to young researchers are often too small to support truly independent research.