We had a piece of good news toward the end of last year, while the uncertain, deflationary economic situation remained to be overshadowing all issues in the business year. Masatoshi Koshiba (76 of age), an honorary professor of Tokyo University, received a Nobel Award for physics; a few days later followed Koichi Tanaka (43 of age) of Shimadzu for chemistry, which made the 12th Nobel Prize Winner for Japan with others from our country three years in a row. The Nobel Prize for Prof. Koshiba had been long awaited and expected for his pioneering work in what is later named “Neutrino Astronomy”, while the one for Mr. Tanaka was totally unexpected and turned out to be a surprise to the ranks of academicians or government officials promoting Nobel Award Winner from Japan including Mr. Tanaka himself. He said, “I thought it was a Candid Camera goof”.

The two Nobel Award Winners make a big contrast as Prof. Koshiba has all the credentials to be named a Nobel Laureate while Mr. Tanaka is an engineer working in a private industry with only a Bachelor degree in electronic engineering. Mr. Tanaka has become a media’s target overnight because of his innocent, yet humane remarks, which is interpreted to represent “healing” or heart-warming messages that symbolize engineers so dedicated to their work of developing products and being so remote from worldly affairs, career advancement or high society’s limelight. He is bewildered at the fact his life has changed so much since the announcement of the Nobel Award and is even worried about when he can go back to engineering work as before.

His discovery was around the development of a new method of ionizing molecules or protein, and the paper which brought him a Nobel prize was “MALDI: Matrix Assisted Laser Desorption / Ionization”. A protein is of 50,000 to 100,000 molecular weight or 10 to the minus 19th power gram, thus a conventional gravity method does not work. A method used is to measure a flight time of an ionized molecule between two electrodes, which is proportional to the square
root of its mass.. However, a protein is damaged when placed under laser beam for ionization. He discovered accidentally that when glycerin was dropped to the matrix he was testing, protein was ionized without being damaged. Without his expertise and long cultivated observational skills it would have been easily overlooked. But to him it was a mere extension of his ordinary work as an employed engineer.

Prof. Koshiba’s case was very different. When he discovered 11 neutrinos created by a new star or the explosion of a dying star in the great Magellanic clouds at 160,000 light-year distance in 1987, two months after the completion of KamikokaNDE (where 1,000 pieces of 20 inch photo multipliers were submerged in water in the old mining tunnel of Kamioka in Gifu Prefecture, there were other two competing research sites; one in the USA called IMB (Irvine-Michigan-Brookhaven) and the other called LSD (Liquid Scintillator Detector) conducted by Italian and Russian scientists in Europe. First, LSD group announced they captured 5 neutrinos, but KamiokaNDE detected nothing at that time but 11 neutrinos at a time more than 4 hours later than the time LSD group announced. (NDE means Nucleon Decay Experiment, and KamiokaNDE is the facility built for detecting proton decay under the guidance of Prof. Koshiba.)

Prof. Koshiba by his instinct gathered it would be a controversial argument as one could be wrong, thus ordered all his crew of about a dozen people to do a thorough analysis and not to disclose any information until after the complete analysis was done. They spent more than a week analyzing the data from all angles to verify their data were accurate even with some colleagues joining from the States, and then completed a draft for a paper submission. Since they were receiving so many inquiries as to their discovery, Prof. Koshiba decided to allow releasing the abstract of the paper prior to the submission of the paper. Then, a prominent Japanese physicist (Koshi sounded in his book as if this scientist, though famous, did not appreciate the importance of controlling information.) informed IMB group about the time when KamiokaNDE discovered the neutrinos, and then IMB group researched the data they gathered at around the same time thus discovered 8 signals, which otherwise would have been buried among background noises. They were researching without success the data gathered at around the time the LSD group disclosed, thus were about to give up their efforts of searching for neutrinos. The IMB group made a public announcement saying they discovered the signals. One fellow from the IMB group phoned Prof. Koshiba to tell that fact implying they were the first one to discover the neutrinos. Prof. Koshiba replied, “That’s bullshit” (I am not sure if he used such a word as I translated it from Japanese.) I know who gave you the information about the time when we discovered neutrinos.

Later a good friend of his who worked at IMB phoned him saying, “You may be disgusted about the air-head  in our group who phoned but we will add the following statement at the end of our paper.” He went on to say, “IMB researched the data at the time LDS announced they discovered but could not find anything. Then researched the time of KamiokaNDE and then discovered the signals.” Prof. Koshibas’s strategy and his association in the international community helped him be the first to discover the neutrinos, which led him to be the Nobel Award Winner. Incidentally the findings of IMB also helped him authenticate that KamiokaNDE’s signals were genuine.

Prof.Koshiba describes his life and discovery in his book, ”I Wanted to Be a Physicist!” He is more like an entrepreneur, as his project was so enormous in monetary terms, and a very strategic coordinator in provoking and conducting experiments.

When he was asked, “For what is the neutrino useful?” he replied, “It is not useful for anything”, with a smile to a puzzled interviewer. Its usefulness has to wait 100 years. That is what he may be saying as I read his book. It is quite a contrast to Mr. Tanaka’s case. Mr. Tanaka is a first rate engineer who may make more contributions to the company as well as to the scientific community for what he will do from now, while Prof. Koshiba is a retired academician who will remain a metaphor to a lot of his followers to continue research at Super KamiokaDNE or for Neutrino astronomy that will eventually have a chance to disclose what happened one second after the Universe was born.

It is only the Nobel Award that can encompass such a wide range of discoveries and scientific works but yet give great respect and prestige to both cases. It is a great message and encouragement to scientists and to corporate salaried engineers throughout the world who simply love and are dedicate to create products for commercial use.