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Narrow research: the world's smallest electrical wire is just a dozen or so carbon atoms wide. Credit: SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) is actively backing an ambitious large-scale national research and development project designed to produce ‘highly functional carbon and related materials’.

The move reflects a shift in the focus of MITI's support for research and development from basic towards more applied research, as part of its efforts to help restructure and stimulate Japan's economy by contributing to the growth of new industries.

The five-year project into the possible application of carbon materials — including fullerenes, carbon nanotubes, carbon nitride and diamond-like carbon — is one of several industry-orientated research projects being launched this year by MITI's Agency of Industrial Science and Technology (AIST).

MITI officials say there has been a policy decision to encourage the establishment of new competitive industries in response to the current poor economic conditions, following the cabinet approval last May of plans to reform the Japanese economy.

Harutoshi Yamada of AIST says that building new industries and technologies is a priority for the government. The relative lack of venture-capital-based businesses, combined with a reluctance by university professors to establish their own companies, means the ministry must actively encourage promising technologies, he says. “In Japan, everything cannot be left to the market.”

The government is backing this strategy. Despite an austere budget for the new fiscal year that starts in April, leaving overall government expenditure virtually flat, MITI won a relatively large increase of 4.3 per cent in its research and development budget (see Nature 391, 111; 1998).

Over the past few years the powerful ministry, internationally renowned for its active industrial policy and encouragement of new technologies, has increasingly focused its attention on nurturing basic research and turning its 15 national research institutes into international “centres of excellence”.

But ministry officials acknowledge that the focus has switched to creating new technologies and industries. The new Frontier Carbon Technology Project, an illustration of this shift, will be based at MITI's National Institute of Materials and Chemical Research (NIMC) in Tsukuba, northwest of Tokyo.

The project will receive ¥1.4 billion (US$12 million) each year over a five-year period. Researchers will work on synthesis and materialization technologies for highly functional carbon and related materials. Yoshinori Koga, a senior researcher at the institute, says this could lead to the development of new devices, semiconductors and materials for use in flat panel displays.

The project has received wide support from academics and industry in Japan, which has relatively strong research on nanotubes and fullerenes. Yohji Achiba, a leading Japanese chemist and researcher into fullerenes at Tokyo Metropolitan University, argues that the time has come to make a national effort to promote such research, as it is essential for the country's future to take the financial risks involved in supporting research that might not deliver the results anticipated.

One company to welcome the project is the electronics manufacturer NEC, a world leader in research into fullerenes and carbon nanotubes. “We would like to expand our research activities through the project,” says Hisatsune Watanabe, vice-president of NEC's research and development group.

He says the project offers the opportunity to create new devices to control photons, such as scanning near-field optical microscopes, as well as the chance to work with companies from different fields.

Not all supporters of the carbon project are optimistic that it will lead to the creation of new industries. Although it might be politically important for MITI to be seen to be expanding industrial activity in Japan, argues one senior industry expert, the creation of these industries “is not so easy”, as applications are still a long way off.

The project will be funded through the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization and will link researchers at NIMC with industry and universities in a focused group under a new ‘concentrated research and development system’.

Other new MITI research projects being launched this year include a large-scale genome programme aimed at developing technologies for decoding and using genetic information, and a superconductor application technology programme.