RIKEN is a large research institute in Japan.
Founded in 1917, it now has approximately 3000 scientists on seven campuses across Japan,
the main one in Wako, just outside Tokyo.
RIKEN is an Independent Administrative Institution whose formal name in Japanese is Rikagaku
Kenkyūsho and in English is the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research.
RIKEN conducts research in many areas of science, including physics, chemistry, biology, medical
science, engineering and computational science, and ranging from basic research to practical
applications.
It is almost entirely funded by the Japanese government, and its annual budget is approximately
¥88 billion.
History
In 1913 the well-known scientist Jokichi Takamine first proposed the establishment of a national
science research institute in Japan.
This task was taken on by Eiichi Shibusawa, a prominent businessman, and following a resolution
by the Diet in 1915, RIKEN came into existence in March 1917.
In its first incarnation, RIKEN was a private foundation, funded by a combination of industry,
the government, and the Imperial Household.
It was located in the Komagome district of Tokyo, and its first Director was the mathematician
Dairoku Kikuchi.
In 1927 Masatoshi Ōkōchi, the third Director, established the RIKEN Konzern.
This was a group of spin-off companies that used RIKEN's scientific achievements for commercial
ends and returned the profits to RIKEN.
At its peak in 1939 the Konzern comprised about 121 factories and 63 companies, including
Riken Kankōshi, which is now Ricoh.
During World War II the Japanese army's atomic bomb program was conducted at RIKEN.
In April 1945 the US bombed RIKEN's laboratories in Komagome, and in November, after the end
of the war, Allied soldiers destroyed its two cyclotrons.
After the war, the Allies dissolved RIKEN as a private foundation, and it was brought
back to life as a company called Kagaku Kenkyūsho, or KAKEN.
In 1958 the Diet passed the RIKEN Law, whereby the institute returned to its original name
and entered its third incarnation, as a public corporation, funded by the government.
In 1963 it relocated to a large site in Wako, Saitama Prefecture, just outside Tokyo.
Since the 1980s RIKEN has expanded dramatically.
New labs, centers, and institutes have been established in Japan and overseas, including:
in 1984, the Life Science Center in Tsukuba in 1995, the Muon Research Facility at the
Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the UK in 1997, the Harima Institute, the Brain Science
Institute in Wako, and the center at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in the USA
in 1998, the Genomic Sciences Center in 2000, the Yokohama Institute, which now
contains four centers for research in the life sciences
in 2002, the Kobe Institute, which contains the Center for Developmental Biology
In October 2003 RIKEN's status changed again, to Independent Administrative Institution.
As such, RIKEN is still publicly funded, and it is periodically evaluated by the government,
but it has a higher degree of autonomy than before.
RIKEN is regarded as the flagship research institute in Japan.
It conducts basic and applied experimental research in a wide range of science and technology
fields including physics, chemistry, medical science, biology and engineering.
In the wake of the 2014 Stimulus-triggered acquisition of pluripotency cell controversy,
observers, journalists, and former members of RIKEN have stated that the organization
is riddled with unprofessional and inadequate scientific rigor and consistency, and that
this is reflective of serious issues with scientific research in Japan in general.
Organizational structure
The main divisions of RIKEN are listed here.
Purely administrative divisions are omitted.
Headquarters Next-Generation Supercomputer R&D Center
Wako Branch Center for Emergent Matter Science
Center for Sustainable Resource Science Nishina Center for Accelerator-Based Science
Brain Science Institute Center for Advanced Photonics
Research Cluster for Innovation Global Research Cluster
Tsukuba Branch BioResource Center
Harima Institute RIKEN SPring-8 Center
Yokohama Branch(site of the Yokohama Nuclear magnetic resonance facility)
Center for Integrative Medical Sciences Center for Life Science Technologies
Bioinformatics And Systems Engineering division Center of Research Network for Infectious
Diseases
Kobe Branch Center for Developmental Biology
Quantitative Biology Center
Advanced Institute for Computational Science Facts and achievements
Two RIKEN scientists have won the Nobel prize for physics: Hideki Yukawa in 1949 and Shinichiro
Tomonaga in 1965.
The SPring-8 facility in Harima is the world's largest and most powerful third-generation
synchrotron radiation facility.
The RIKEN Genomic Sciences Center in Yokohama was one of the sixteen institutions that formed
the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium.
In July 2004 a team at RIKEN created the first confirmed instance of element 113, which is
now known as "Unutrium".
On April 2, 2005 the same team successfully created it for the second time.
On May 23, 2005, the eight-storey RI Beam Factory Experiment Facility opened in Wako.
The RIKEN Super Combined Cluster is one of the world's fastest supercomputers.
In January 2006, RIKEN set up the Next-Generation Supercomputer R&D Center, with the purpose
of designing and building the fastest supercomputer in the world, and in June 2006, it announced
the completion of a one-petaflops computer system designed specially for molecular dynamics
simulation.
Currently a new system, the K computer is being installed at RIKEN and despite it being
still not finished, it topped the LINPACK benchmark with the performance of 8.162 petaflops,
or 8.162 quadrillion calculations per second, with a computing efficiency ratio of 93.0%,
making it the fastest supercomputer in the world.
The complete project entered service in November 2012.
There are a small number of graduate students at RIKEN, but it does not award degrees itself.
Name The full Japanese name of RIKEN is Rikagaku
Kenkyūsho, which literally means "The Institute of Physical and Chemical Research".
RIKEN is a Japanese abbreviation of this.
"The Institute of Physical and Chemical Research" was formerly used as an alternative English
name, or a kind of subtitle, for RIKEN.
But in 2003, when it became an Independent Administrative Institution, this name was
officially discarded, and the English appellation is now just "RIKEN", in capital letters.
The media sometimes refer to it as "Riken" or "the Riken institute".
"RIKEN" is pronounced as a single word: . The full Japanese name, "Rikagaku Kenkyūsho",
is sometimes pronounced "Rikagaku Kenkyūjo", which may be used less often but is not incorrect
as it is merely an example of Rendaku.
List of presidents Haruo Nagaoka
Shirō Akahori Toshio Hoshino
Shinji Fukui Tatsuoki Miyajima
Minoru Oda Akito Arima
Shunichi Kobayashi Ryōji Noyori
Notable scientists and other people from RIKEN Kotaro Honda, inventor of KS steel
Kikunae Ikeda, discoverer of monosodium glutamate and the umami flavor
Dairoku Kikuchi, mathematician and the first Director of RIKEN
Seishi Kikuchi, physicist, known for his explanation of the Kikuchi lines
Hiroaki Kitano systems biologist involved in Robocup, AIBO etc
Hantaro Nagaoka, postulator of the Saturnian model of the atom
Ukichiro Nakaya, physicist and essayist Yoshio Nishina, leading atomic physicist who
worked with Bohr, Einstein, Heisenberg and Dirac
Ryōji Noyori, current President, and winner of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2001
Umetaro Suzuki, discoverer of vitamin B1 Haruko Obokata, claimed to have developed
a radical and remarkably easy way to make cells that can grow into any tissue in the
body called STAP cells Toshio Takamine, specialist in spectroscopy,
author of The "Near Infra-Red Spectra of Helium and Mercury" and "Absorption of Ha Line" and
"The structure of mercury lines examined by an echelon grating and a Lummer-Gehrcke plate"
Masatoshi Takeichi, discoverer of the cadherin family of cell-cell adhesion molecules and
head of the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology
Torahiko Terada, physicist and essayist Shinichiro Tomonaga, winner of the 1965 Nobel
physics prize for his work on quantum electrodynamics Susumu Tonegawa, head of the Brain Science
Institute and winner of the 1987 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his discovery
of the mechanism of antibody diversity.
Tadashi Watanabe, head of RIKEN's Next-Generation Supercomputer R&D Center
Hideki Yukawa, physicist who won the 1949 Nobel prize for his prediction of the pion
See also RIKEN integrated database of mammals
Notes and references
External links RIKEN official website – this official website
is the source for all of the information in this article
RIKEN Research – A resource for up-to-date information on key achievements of RIKEN researchers.
Life at RIKEN – An information resource for prospective RIKEN researchers from outside
of Japan.