Tokyo

An offer by a Japanese government organization to pay for Nobel Foundation officials to visit prize-hungry Japan is ruffling feathers in Stockholm.

The Science Council of Japan says it will pay for Nobel laureates and representatives — including the director and secretary of each of the Nobel Foundation's three scientific committees — to travel to Tokyo next March for a forum celebrating 100 years of the Nobel prizes.

But one of the invited officials says the offer to cover the trip's expenses is unnecessary and inappropriate — especially at a time when Japan has set a national target of winning 30 Nobel prizes in the next 50 years.

“The invitations pose an ethical problem for me as there is such an outspoken Japanese policy to acquire Nobel prizes,” says Anders Bárány, a physicist at Stockholm University and secretary of the physics committee. “The Nobel Foundation has enough money to pick up the bill.”

The government's Nobel target has been attacked by some Japanese academics as inappropriate (see Nature 413, 560; 2001, Box 2). But others have defended it as a harmless goal that will spur researchers and help to ensure political support for science in Japan.

The March forum will coincide with the opening of a touring exhibition on the Nobels, for which Japan is the first stop. “In other international events, it has been customary to cover invitees' costs,” says Kiyoshi Kurokawa, vice-president of the science council. “This isn't special treatment.” But he adds that the council “will wait to see how the Nobel Foundation wants to handle expenses” before it actually pays them.

Not all Nobel Foundation officials are concerned by the proposed arrangement. “For travel and hotel expenses to be covered by the inviting organizers seems to be standard procedure,” says Michael Sohlman, executive director of the Nobel Foundation.

Bárány says he supports the forum itself, but fears a repeat of the controversy that attached itself to the 1986 award of the medicine prize to Rita Levi-Montalcini of Italy's Institute of Cell Biology in Rome. It was later alleged in Swedish newspapers that a Nobel committee member had accepted an expenses-paid trip from a drug company that wanted Levi-Montalcini to get the prize. “Investigations showed that the Nobel committee member just failed to realize that this kind of question can come up,” says Bárány, adding that this was “silly, as each committee has money for this kind of travel anyway”.

But there are no clear guidelines for what committee members can or cannot accept in terms of invitations. Bárány says he wants the Nobel Foundation to address this issue quickly. But Sohlman does not think it is a problem. “We have been relying on the common sense of the members of the Nobel institutions for a hundred years now,” he says, “and have reason to continue to do so.”